Intellect Books, Iq Magazine: Winter 2005

intellect quarterly no. 3 / thinking in colour / winter 2005

IQ FILM FOCUS

PAGE 10

DOCUMENTARY FILM

SONG IN CINEMA DECONSTRUCTING GROSSE POINTE BLANK

CRASH AND THE CITY RACE & RAGE ON THE STREETS OF LOS ANGELES ISSN 1478-7350 03

www.intellectbooks.com 9 77 1 4 7 8 7 3 5 0 1 5

INTELLECT QUARTERLY / WWW.INTELLECTBOOKS.COM

IQ CONTENTS WINTER 2005

06 ART&DESIGN THE PURPOSE OF DRAWING

08 INTERVIEW JOURNAL EDITOR RACHEL MASON

10 FEATURE»FILM SONG IN CINEMA / DOCUMENTARY FILM

30 EDUCATION HAND VS. MOUSE BY ROSEMARY SASSOON 22 Q&A DANIEL LINDVALL | 24 CRASH AND THE CITY | 27 INSPIRATION

Cover Image: This issue’s cover image comes to us from Intellect author and digital artist Eduardo Kac. The piece is entitled ‘Amalgam’ and is one in a series of images that fall under the category of Holopoetry. Read more about this fascinating typographical experiment on page 28.

Publisher/Editor Masoud Yazdani Associate Editor May Yao Art Director Gabriel Solomons Intellect Ltd. PO Box 862 Bristol BS99 1DE Tel: 0117 9589910 Fax: 0117 9589911 www.intellectbooks.com

iq intellect quarterly

ISSN 1478-7350 ©2005 Intellect Ltd. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, transmitted in any form or by any means without permission of the publisher. Intellect accept no responsibility for views expressed by contributors to IQ; or for unsolicted manuscripts, photographs or illustrations; or for errors in articles or advertisements.

Quote References pg.4 Baha’u’llah (Prophet) pg.6 G.K. Chesterton (Essayist & Novelist) pg.12 David Mamet (Writer & Film-Maker) pg.13 Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton (Poet) pg.19 Iris Murdoch (Poet) pg.20 Oscar Wilde (Poet, Writer) pg.21 Ivy Compton-Burnett (Novelist) pg.22 Alfred Hitchcock (Film-Maker) pg.24 Barbara Mikulsky (US Politician) pg.25 Dorothy Parker (Author & Poet) pg.27 Anthony Robbins (Success Expert) pg.30 Smiley Blanton (Success Expert)

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04 INTRODUCTION» “SEE THROUGH THINE OWN EYES AND NOT THROUGH THE EYES OF OTHERS...”

How did Intellect books get started? Intellect started as a hobby while I was a lecturer in Media Computing at Exeter University. We have been publishing original ideas in the new and emerging subjects related to creative media – such as art, film, television, design and international culture – since 1986. We wanted to publish books that other publishers did not think had a large enough market in these topics. Intellect relocated its office in 1999 to Bristol as I had become Professor of Digital Media at the University of the West of England. Three years ago I came to an agreement with UWE to be allowed to focus most of my time on building Intellect up as a ‘proper’ business and these three years have been the most enjoyable time of my career. In 2005 we will be publishing 20 academic journals, 25 books and the bimonthly free art and music magazine DECODE. What’s it like running a publishing house from Bristol, and how is the publishing scene here? Is the city vibrant enough to support your business, or is there any pressure to be in London? Bristol is an ideal home for a publishing company like us. People are less hung up  | intellect quarterly

about making money as those in London, but are just as talented! We can get some of the best writing for our publications from people in the South West almost free of charge. That allows us to maintain our non-conformist commissioning policy and still pay the bills. We could not afford to survive a day if we were based in London. It is the combination of high talent and low costs that makes a company like us able to grow here.

Q & A WITH

MASOUD YAZDANI PUBLISHER

How do you rate the local intellectual scene? I think Bath, Bristol, Exeter and the rest of the South West is an untapped intellectual powerhouse. The reason it does not get the attention it deserves is due to a lack of resources and a generally more humble character of the region’s people. What’s your ‘mission statement’? Intellect publishes books and journals by authors and editors with original thinking they strongly believe in. We commission regardless of whether there is an established readership for the ideas. We will do our best to get these ideas to be heard as widely as possible, sometimes by giving our publications away for free! We choose

‘I THINK BATH, BRISTOL, EXETER AND THE REST OF THE SOUTH WEST IS AN UNTAPPED INTELLECTUAL POWERHOUSE.’

05 INTRODUCTION» MASOUD YAZDANI: PUBLISHER

authors and editors who in backing their ideas, are willing to be part of our publishing process by investing their energy and resources as needed. Are you planning to branch into other genres, or stick with your broadly media/ technology portfolio? The topics that we cover provide an interesting antidote to traditional academic publishing. Other publishers are focused on hard sciences, medicine and law where there is a lot of money and prestige. On the other hand, our subjects do not have a long heritage of academic research and are seen by some people as ‘soft’. So this provides a double-edged sword: it makes our publications a challenge to market since no demand exists, but it also means that we do not have strong competition from the well-established publishers. We think the topics that we cover are broad enough and interesting enough to remain the focus of our attention. However we want to publish more magazines, maybe in collaboration with other organizations in creative technologies. Your books are now available in e-book format. How has that affected sales? Electronic publishing has become an integral part of Intellect’s strategy but we do not believe that it will replace other forms of publishing. We have been publishing e-books since 1999 through third party distributors. Our limited funds kept us out of the early hype of the ‘dot com’ race. However, we saw that librarians were becoming interested in electronic resources, and we now have established relationships with NetLibrary and Ebrary who sell our books in PDF form. These companies provide an additional revenue stream without the need for up-front investment. As we also use PDF files for sending the manuscripts to printers, making books available online does not add any major extra cost. As such, any income we get from the sale of our e-books is an incremental and welcome bonus. Interestingly, purchasers of the electronic versions often also buy a printed copy for the library further down the line. Recently we made all our journals available online free of charge to those who subscribe to the print versions. We have also made DECODE magazine available online free of charge. None of this has harmed our overall revenue income. More generally, do you think the Internet is helping publishing or will eventually bring about the death of books? I doubt if the e-book will ever replace the printed book. It would just become another way of reading the book in the same way as audio books extend the range of readership. For Intellect, e-books are another way of reaching readership for ideas that are novel and may be difficult to reach via traditional methods. However, I think the web is going to make life difficult for those publishers that currently dominate the market with expensive books and periodicals. The web has stacked the odds in favour of the newcomers with new ideas. { intellect quarterly | 5

06 ART&DESIGN» “ART, LIKE MORALITY, CONSISTS IN DRAWING THE LINE SOMEWHERE.”

DRAWING CONCLUSIONS DRAWING AS A PROCESS, PRACTICE AND PURPOSE ‘HOW MANY OF US HAVE EITHER SAID, OR HEARD SAID “I CAN’T DRAW” OR THE MORE EXTREME “I COULDN’T DRAW A STRAIGHT LINE TO SAVE MY LIFE”?’ TEXT BY LEO DUFF

T

his assumption is usually based on the single preconception that the sole purpose of a drawing is for it to resemble the subject with a likeness verging on the photographic. For any practitioner in areas of art and design, these statements create a familiar feeling, but their interpretation is different. No one ever feels that they ‘know’ how to draw. It is doubtful that there is an artist or designer working at present who would say that they feel they know all they need about drawing, or that their drawing could not be improved in several ways, or that it had reached its highest level. And of course there is always a ruler if you do need to draw a straight line. It is via the ruler that we learn much of the information we need about perspective, scale and proportion in order to achieve a recognisable likeness to a subject. The ruler is not used to draw the lines; it is held and used as a guide, a guide for the operation of the eye and the hand. To quote Peter Barber of the British Library ‘You should be suspicious when you see a straight line on a map’.1 If even a ruler is only a guide rather than a template, what does the process of drawing really involve? Few artists and designers have drawing as their sole practice, it is a part of it, and for many a very important part. It is not the finished piece of work that makes the drawing; it is the process which leads to it. In Drawing – The Process, Zandra Rhodes, the celebrated fashion and textiles artist designer famed in particular for her contribution to the creation of Punk, comments that she wishes that she had time to draw everyday, and that she does draw every day while on holiday or working away from her busy studio.2 She also has in a prominent position in her home (above the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey) drawings of a  | intellect quarterly

cabbage and of a stinging nettle. These she carried out just after her diploma and before joining the Royal College of Art. They underline her opinion that contemporary students of art and design do not spend enough time on drawing, or on a single drawing. Their favour of speed over consideration and sustained observation halts the development of good eye and hand coordination, qualities essential for working in professional textiles and fashion studio – or any studio. Thus part of the process of drawing which helps the evolution of Zandra Rhodes’ work is the rigour of sustained drawing – such as the cabbage or stinging nettle in their detailed, life-sized and particular observations. Another vital element is practice. Like practicing the piano, it gets better. The use of sketch books is a normal activity for many artists and designers. Not as one clean page after the other in which to record holiday locations from a café table or sleepy observations of the cat on the mat, but as a way of thinking ‘out loud’ and making thoughts on paper. The artist or designers sketch book will include writings, additions of collage or paint, shopping lists, doodles, scribbles from phone Daisies, 1992 conversations. The drawings made By Zandra Rhodes in the sketch book undergo development until moving out from the sketch book to the next stage in the creation of something new. Practice in this form, as regular and progressive working through ideas, not only helps the drawing improve, it helps the maker see what they are looking at. Zandra Rhodes uses sketch books all the time, and through keeping these, has at her elbow the ‘history’ of her creative life. Here you can see from their early stages the evolution of now famous patterns and designs for fabrics and entire collections. Single ‘snap shot’ drawings in sketch books offer new insights into shapes, dimensions and interpretations of the everyday,

07 ART&DESIGN» FURTHER INFO. ON INTELLECT BOOKS & JOURNALS: WWW.INTELLECTBOOKS.COM

provide rich pickings for development of ideas. Here we can see drawings of real places, living plants, buildings or rocks, they ‘grow’ as they are drawn over and over again until reaching the point where they leave the page and enter the studio tables for enlargement, reworking and eventual production. John Vernon Lord, a traditional illustrator and highly respected educationalist in illustration in the United Kingdom describes drawing as being… ‘Visual ideas about form and space, about lightness and darkness... drawings have a lot to do with trying to make sense of the world as we know it and what we have seen, thought about, or remembered’.3 Each and every drawing that is made has a different purpose – compare an IKEA diagram to a Leonardo cartoon, or a page from Zandra Rhodes’ sketch book to an architects plan. This difference of purpose is also applied to each drawing made by any individual. From process to purpose is not such a long journey in drawing, it meanders through practice and perseverance, dashes through inspiration and expression and will lead to the destination, be it a design for a coat, a car, a table lamp or a piece of art work to absorb at leisure. The artist and designer need the journey, and there are no short cuts. {

‘FEW ARTISTS AND DESIGNERS HAVE DRAWING AS THEIR SOLE PRACTICE, IT IS A PART OF IT, AND FOR MANY A VERY IMPORTANT PART.’ Below: Tiny Zen Garden, Kyoto, 1993 Bottom: Austria, 1993 Both by Zandra Rhodes

Leo Duff is Leader of Drawing as Process Research at Kingston University, Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture. 1. Davies, J. & Duff, L. (2005) (Eds.), Drawing – The Process, Bristol: Intellect, p. 94. 2. Ibid., p.128. 3. Ibid., p.30.

Drawing The Process Edited by Jo Davies & Leo Duff £14.95/$29.95 A collection of papers, theories and interviews reflecting a wide range of approaches to the process of drawing. Available now.

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08 Q&A»RACHEL MASON FURTHER INFO. ON INTELLECT BOOKS & JOURNALS: WWW.INTELLECTBOOKS.COM

THE EDUCATION THROUGH ART EDITOR TALKS TO IQ What brought you to propose this journal specifically? This is something I have always wanted to do for InSEA. I have been a member since 1981 and find the truly international forum it offers very stimulating, socially and professionally. The members really do come from all over the world. Much of what the society does is ephemeral, however – like conferences: new members who cannot go to conferences need something more concrete in return for their membership. Another issue is that provision of and discourse about art education is very varied internationally and most of it that gets into journals is Anglo (European and North American). There are exciting and different things happening in many other places. There are educational reasons as well – to improve and extend discourse about and within the profession. How do you feel the reader will see its unique qualities? I hope they will respond favourably to its diverse international focus (the aim is for each paper in an issue to come from a different country etc.), and see it as a place for young authors with new ideas to publish (not the same ones who dominate writing about the field everywhere else). The focus on education through art rather than in art is different from other art education journals, as is broadening the concept of teaching and learning to reach beyond the school curriculum. We are keen to develop imagebased texts because this is more  | intellect quarterly

‘WE ARE KEEN TO DEVELOP IMAGE BASED TEXTS BE CAUSE THIS IS MORE REPRESEN TATIVE OF WHAT THE FIELD IS ABOUT...’

representative of what the field is about, but these must have educational intentions underpinning them that are clearly explicated. What else are you working on at present? Have just co-edited a book with Larry O’ Farrell called Issues in Arts Education in Latin America, published by Queens University. I am now co-editing a second book in the series on African art education with Elspeth Court. I am doing a funded project that is reviewing research on cultural learning and art – asking how art education contributes to the

formation of cultural identity and understanding others. I am kept busy with doctoral students from all over the world at my Centre for Art Education and International Research: they are mostly researching multi-cultural, crosscultural and international issues in art education. Tell us about the best stage, screen or television performance you have seen in the last twelve months. My taste is eclectic!! A concert by primary-age students in Beijing in December 2004 where they played traditional musical instruments I had never seen before

both skilfully and amazingly well. As well as their skilfulness I was amazed by their lack of interest in audience response and applause. I always like watching Six Foot Under on TV: the black humour, I guess, reminds me not to take life – or death – too seriously, and it is courageous in the way it explores controversial social issues. Edward Hopper at the Tate Modern. His paintings have influenced the way I and lots of others see the American landscape profoundly and the treatment of light in his work is amazing. {

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2005

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intellect journals Education through Art ISSN 1743-5234 3 numbers/volume

Media and Cultural Politics ISSN 1740-8296 3 numbers/volume

Performance Arts and Digital Media ISSN 1479-4713 3 numbers/volume

The International Journal of Education through Art is a new English language journal that promotes relationships between the two disciplines. The journal comprises refereed texts in the form of critical essays, articles, exhibition reviews and image-text features.

The International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics publishes work that directly addresses 'real world' affairs, relating different cultures and societies and aiming to bridge the gap between theoretical/ abstract knowledge and cultural and social practice.

The International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media is a new interdisciplinary publication drawing contributions from researchers and practitioners placed at the rapidly developing interface of new technologies with performance arts.

The journal provides a platform for those who wish to question and evaluate the ways in which art is produced, disseminated and interpreted across a diverse range of educational contexts through debates on areas such as art, craft and design education, formal and informal education contexts, and pedagogy. Policy and practice, research, comparative education, and transcultural issues are all considered within the journal’s mission to raise debates in these areas.

The journal recognises the importance of issues that cut across cultures and nations in the domain of media and communication, and seeks out innovative accounts that originate from both metropolitan and non-metropolitan cultural locations. There is an understanding of the need to remain highly attuned to the politics of international and 'glocal' communication and cultural processes, while aiming to respond to real life events by bridging the (perceptual) gap between theory and practice.

The broad range of topics includes cultural mediatization, live performance with interactive systems, and motion capture technologies, as well as audience-performer-new media and interactive performance installations among many others. The journal is for lecturers, researchers, students, practitioners and educators in music, theatre and dance and performance as well as researchers and software developers with an interest in the performance arts.

10 FEATURE»FILM SONG IN CINEMA | VISION & VERITÉ: DOCUMENTARY FILMS 19

SHOOTING BLANKS JEFF SMITH REVEALS THE MANY LAYERS OF MEANING FOUND BY THE USE OF ‘LIVE AND LET DIE’ IN THE FILM GROSSE POINTE BLANK

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11 FEATURE»FILM FILM INTERNATIONAL 22 | CRASH AND THE CITY 24

When you were young and your heart was an open book, You used to say ‘live and let live’ (You know you did, you know you did, you know you did) But if this ever-changing world in which we’re living Makes you give in and cry, Say ‘Live and Let Die’

T

he use of ‘Live and Let Die’ in Grosse Pointe Blank is almost everything that pop music should be in a Hollywood film: clever, ironic, and rich in its textual and intertextual implications. Unlike many pop songs in Hollywood films, which are used to make a simple point about character or setting, ‘Live and Let Die’ functions here at several different levels simultaneously. In its immediate narrative context, the song conveys the titular hero Martin Blank’s rising anger at learning that his family abode has disappeared. At a much broader level, however, the song also reinforces the film’s satiric treatment of commodity culture and competition within corporate capitalism. And at still another level, the song intertextually links Blank with the James Bond series, a group of films which provide an implicit contrast between John Cusack’s verbose, self-abnegating protagonist and the suave, but deadly English hero. At the outset, it is worth noting that the Guns N’ Roses recording in this scene fulfills one of the most basic functions of film music, namely signifying a character’s emotions and point of view. The overall arc of the music mirrors the growing anger and confusion experienced by Blank during this scene. As instruments are added to the simple piano accompaniment that begins the song, the music swells to suggest this increase in emotional intensity. The instrumental break further reinforces Blank’s decision to take action through the change to a faster tempo and the arrangement’s emphasis on Slash’s heavily distorted guitar melodies. In this sense, the film provides a means of reorienting the basic sounds of heavy metal by situating them within a specific narrative context. Broadly speaking, the wailing guitars, thudding backbeats, and thick instrumental textures of heavy metal, which semiotically connote a mixture of rage, lust, desire, and hope, are directed toward a more particular narrative purpose here, the communication of Martin Blank’s emotional turmoil. While the music’s signification of emotion is quite conventional, its apparent shift from score to source music is not. At least initially, the sequence holds out the possibility that ‘Live and Let Die’ is diegetically motivated as music ema-

nating from Blank’s car radio. After all, the audience has been primed to expect this from earlier sequences of Blank in his car. For example, an aerial shot of Blank arriving in Grosse Pointe is accompanied by the Violent Femmes’ ‘Blister in the Sun’. As is the case with ‘Live and Let Die’, the Femmes’ tune is used as a sound bridge that begins during the previous sequence, but is subsequently revealed to be source music when Blank pops the tape out of his car stereo. Any expectation that the Guns N’ Roses recording would be handled in a similar fashion is dispelled when Blank exits the car and starts walking toward the store. The music’s status as underscore is further secured by the music’s swell during Axl Rose’s intonation of the song’s title, a device that fills the space of the soundtrack and eliminates any competing ambient sounds. As Blank enters the Ultimart, however, the music abruptly shifts registers from non-diegetic to diegetic. The easy listening version of the tune cleverly picks up the last musical phrase heard in the Guns N’ Roses recording, a technique borrowed from the opening of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973). In that film, Altman moves back and forth between three different recordings of the title song, all of them diegetically motivated. Armitage’s deployment of this device, however, adds a filigree not present in the Altman film. By moving from non-diegetic to diegetic, from Guns N’ Roses to Muzak, Armitage uses the music in a manner that replicates the immediate experience of his nettled hero. The shift from the bombastic style of Guns N’ Roses to the homogenized, sweet instrumental sounds of Adam Fields parallels the hero’s experience in which the site of his nostalgia has been converted to a shrine for commodity culture. In the same way that the roughness and rebelliousness of Axl Rose has been defanged and resituated within an aural environment of consumerism, Blank’s childhood has been physically erased to make way for beer, soda, cigarettes, and microwave burritos. As Blank puts it during a brief call to Dr Oatman, his psychiatrist: ‘You can never go home again, Oatman, but I guess you can shop there’. The song’s title, ‘Live and Let Die’, actually amplifies this dimension of consumer capitalism through its apparent reference to the world of hired killers depicted in the film. Beyond the obvious parallel between killing and dying, the title serves as an apt reference to the cutthroat environment that these hit men inhabit. Indeed, the place of hired killers within the global economy is a central conceit of the film, one explored in the film’s central subplot involving Grocer’s efforts to form a hit man collective. The need for such an organization

‘IN THE SAME WAY THAT THE ROUGHNESS AND REBELLIOUSNESS OF AXL ROSE HAS BEEN DEFANGED AND RESITUATED WITHIN AN AURAL ENVIRONMENT OF CONSUMERISM, BLANK’S CHILDHOOD HAS BEEN PHYSICALLY ERASED TO MAKE WAY FOR BEER, SODA, CIGARETTES, AND MICROWAVE BURRITOS.’

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12 FEATURE»FILM “A GOOD FILM SCRIPT SHOULD BE ABLE TO DO COMPLETELY WITHOUT DIALOGUE.”

is established within the film’s opening sequence during which Blank assassinates a rival hit man disguised as a bicycle messenger. Although Blank’s action was ostensibly taken to protect an unnamed man and his bodyguard from the messenger, it proves to be fruitless when Grocer (Dan Aykroyd) guns down the two men immediately after Blank has completed his assignment. In a brief meeting afterward, Grocer points out the obvious wastefulness involved in having three different assassins involved in a single assignment. Noting that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union has flooded the market with suppliers, Grocer suggests that Blank join him in creating a union or trade association of hit men in order to reduce competition for assignments and thereby increase the asking price for each job. The analogy between murder and capitalism is elaborated further when Marcella mockingly suggests that Blank attend his high school reunion in order to network and establish new accounts. And during the film’s final gun battle, when Blank and Grocer team up to kill a team of National Security Agents, the latter coyly remarks on the pairs uneasy alliance by quoting the most famous phrase from The Communist Manifesto: ‘Workers of the world unite’. This broader theme of competition versus cooperation, thus, impacts our understanding of ‘Live and Let Die’ within its narrative context. In the Bond film, the title song refers to the brutality and ruthlessness of both Bond and Dr Kananga (Yaphet Kotto); in Grosse Pointe Blank, the narrative linkage of crime and capitalism gives the title an additional Grosse Pointe Blank George Armitage, 1997 layer of meaning by implicitly referring Director: © Caravan Pictures to the Social Darwinist aspects of a pure market economy. Here again, the music’s shift from non-diegetic song to diegetically motivated Muzak reinforces this larger dimension of the film. Within the shift, the rockist authenticity of Guns N’ Roses is transformed into a pure commodity, a lite version of the song used to encourage the impulse purchases of soft drinks, magazines, and candy bars. The unseen patrons of the Ultimart are, thus, implicated in this Social Darwinist ethic as the target market that hears the entreaties of in store Muzak and falls prey to the soft-sell approach of corpo-

rate marketing strategies. The aforementioned stylistic shift from heavy metal to easy listening serves as a neat reminder that contemporary consumer culture depends on marketing strategies that frequently seek the lowest common denominator in an effort to create unthreatening and impersonal shopping environments. Besides refining the meaning of the song’s title phrase, its inclusion in Grosse Pointe Blank also hints at certain parallels between Blank and Bond, between the modern hit man comedy and the classic Cold War espionage series. Indeed, the telephone byplay between Blank and Marcella is strongly reminiscent of the flirtatious dialogues between Bond and Moneypenny throughout the 007 series. Likewise, in another scene early in the film, Blank attempts to kill a target by slowly dripping poison down a thread from above such that it falls into the open mouth of his unsuspecting and sleeping victim. The mise en scène and editing of this sequence will undoubtedly seem familiar to fans of Dr No, in which an assassin sends a poisonous spider down a rope so that it will sting and kill a sleeping James Bond. Finally, the violent duel to the death between Blank and a laconic, vaguely foreign-looking thug is evocative of similar confrontations from the Bond series. Think, for example, of the memorable fight scenes between 007 and such villains as Red Grant in From Russia With Love (1963), Oddjob in Goldfinger (1964), Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), and Gobinda in Octopussy (1981). These parallels, however, are used to establish a more important contrast between Bond and Blank. Much of the humour of Grosse Pointe Blank comes from its domestication of its ruthless and lethal hero. Blank, like Bond, may have ‘state of the art’ weaponry, wear finely tailored suits, and drive expensive cars, but unlike Bond, he must handle the day-to-day operations of his enterprise and, even more surprisingly, he comes ‘from somewhere’ to use Marcella’s phrase. Thus, Grosse Pointe Blank wrings humour from two different strategies through which it recontextualizes the familiar Bond persona. On the one hand, the film gets chuckles out of several seemingly ordinary, even

‘AS BLANK PUTS IT DURING A BRIEF CALL TO DR. OATMAN, HIS PSYCHIATRIST: “YOU CAN NEVER GO HOME AGAIN, OATMAN, BUT I GUESS YOU CAN SHOP THERE.”’

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13 FEATURE»FILM “IMITATION, IF NOBLE & GENERAL, INSURES THE BEST HOPE OF ORIGINALITY.”

jejune, details of what it takes to run a murder-for-hire operation as a small business. This motif is established in the film’s first shot, which shows Blank using eyewash just before an important hit. Although the juxtaposition initially seems jarring and inappropriate, it springs from a certain quotidian logic that makes intuitive sense. When lining up a target in a rifle scope, one doesn’t want to be bothered by redness, blurriness, or tearing in one’s eyes. Blank’s use of eyewash, thus, becomes a mark of his consummate preparation and professionalism as we see him take steps to ensure that there will be no physical impairment of his ability to complete the task. Humour also arises from several more of these quotidian details as we hear Blank order necessary work supplies, such as ammunition, and are privy to his arrangements with Marcella to pick up his dry cleaning and feed his cat. (Surely, one never thinks of James Bond having to pick up dry cleaning.) On the other hand, Blank also earns chortles from its classic ‘fish out of water’ premise in which a highly skilled, well-trained professional killer returns to the place of his origins, an upper middle-class suburb in Detroit. As Marcella puts it, ‘I find it amusing that you came from somewhere,’ and by returning Blank to his hometown, the film highlights the cultural clash between Blank and his former friends and colleagues. Indeed, Blank’s life is so at odds with the social norms and life experience of his suburban past that he is unable to answer even simple questions about his profession. As he prepares to go with Debbie to his high school reunion, Blank prac- Grosse Pointe Blank George Armitage, 1997 tices his party patter, and tries out sev- Director: © Caravan Pictures eral alternative career paths in an effort to craft a plausible cover story for himself. Through an almost Freudian chain of associations, Blank initially describes himself as a pet psychiatrist, but goes on to say that he sells couch insurance, that he test markets positive thinking, and that he leads a weekend men’s group specializing in ritual killings. By the end of his imagined discourse, Blank is left muttering the brutal truth about himself: ‘I’m not married, I don’t have any kids, and I’d blow your head off if someone paid me enough.’ More often than not, however, Blank simply tells people

the truth about his profession knowing that the truth is so unbelievable that those asking will assume he is either joking or mocking them. For example, when Blank says he is a professional killer to Debbie’s father, the latter presumes Blank is ribbing him and replies dryly that murder is a ‘growth industry.’ By referencing Bond through ‘Live and Let Die’, Blank implicitly positions itself as a kind of domesticated version of the 007 persona. Although the film clearly operates within its own narrative universe, it also engages in a kind of imaginative speculation that uses Blank as a cypher to explore a series of ‘What if...’ questions about Bond’s cinematic image. What if Bond came from a perfectly ordinary, suburban, middleclass background? What if Bond had a high school girlfriend for whom he still had feelings? How would Bond interact with his old acquaintances, who now lead perfectly ordinary lives as parents, teachers, real estate agents, car salesmen, and home security guards? What if, instead of being a government spy with a license to kill, Bond had been a husband and father? The latter point is given special force in the film during a scene in which Blank is given a classmate’s child. As Blank awkwardly holds the baby, director George Armitage underlines their unspoken interaction through a series of brief close-ups that show Blank looking at the child’s wide eyes and innocent face. Like Bond, Blank has money, fine clothes, expensive cars, and neat gadgetry, but also like Bond, he has never experienced the simple joys of marriage and fatherhood. Coming just after Blank’s conversation with an old teacher, the opening verse of ‘Live and Let Die’ neatly captures the sense of personal crisis brought on by Blank’s high school reunion:

‘HOW WOULD BOND INTERACT WITH HIS OLD ACQUAINTANCES, WHO NOW LEAD PERFECTLY ORDINARY LIVES AS PARENTS, TEACHERS, REAL ESTATE AGENTS, CAR SALESMEN, AND HOME SECURITY GUARDS?’

When you were young and your heart was an open book, You used to say ‘live and let live’ (You know you did, you know you did, you know you did) But if this ever-changing world in which we’re living Makes you give in and cry, Say ‘Live and Let Die’

intellect quarterly | 13

14 FEATURE»FILM FURTHER INFO. ON INTELLECT BOOKS & JOURNALS: WWW.INTELLECTBOOKS.COM

Like the narratee of ‘Live and Let Die’, Blank’s youthful hopes and optimism have given way to a sense of embitterment and lost opportunity. In returning to his hometown, Blank begins to question his values, particularly his materialism and solipsism. Here again, whereas in the Bond film, the song seems to be a simple reference to its hero’s ruthlessness, it takes on new meanings within Grosse Pointe Blank through its implicit reference to Blank’s sense of loss and nostalgia as he searches for an irrecoverable past signified in the film by his absent childhood home. In sum, although it is heard in the film for barely more than a couple of minutes, ‘Live and Let Die’ enriches the meanings of Grosse Pointe Blank at several levels through its textual and intertextual operations. At one level, the cue plays with notions of sound space by juxtaposing an apparently non-diegetic recording of the song by Guns N’ Roses with a diegetically motivated ‘easy listening’ version of the song by Adam Fields. Besides manipulating the spectator’s perception of sound space, though, the shift from non-diegetic to diegetic, from rock to Muzak, also encapsulates the import of this narrative moment by providing an aural parallel to the way in which Blank’s childhood home has been converted to a capitalist shrine to consumer convenience. Finally, through its intertextual reference to the James Bond film of the same name, ‘Live and Let Die’ also establishes a series of comparisons and contrasts between Bond as the quintessential British agent and Blank as his neurotic American counterpart. In an almost perfect example of intertextual symbiosis, Grosse Pointe Blank gives new meaning to the famous Paul McCartney song while the song itself extends and elaborates Blank’s central narrative conceit. If only all pop songs in film carried this much emotional weight and abundance of meaning. {

 | intellect quarterly

‘LIKE THE NARRATEE OF LIVE AND LET DIE, BLANK’S YOUTHFUL HOPES AND OPTIMISM HAVE GIVEN WAY TO A SENSE OF EMBITTERMENT AND LOST OPPORTUNITY.’

Grosse Pointe Blank Director: George Armitage, 1997 © Caravan Pictures

FURTHER READING

Pop Fiction: The Song in Cinema Edited by Steve Lannin and Matthew Caley £14.95/$29.95 Pop Fiction’s unique essays individually consider one song within a cinematic context. Unlike previous collected volumes about pop music in film where a generalised approach has been adopted, it offers instead a close examination of these two most pervasive and significant media in contemporary culture. Within this tight structure, an international range of authorities from various backgrounds, provide fresh insights into these audio-visual constructions. Innovative yet accessible, this exciting document gives students, lecturers and researchers a diverse set of models with which to investigate the ‘ideogram’ of image/text/sound – a relationship which sits at the heart of most cultural production. Available now.

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-œ˜ˆVÊ9œÕ̅ œœÊ­ iÕÝÊi`ˆÌˆœ˜® -œ˜ˆVÊ9œÕ̅½ÃÊV>ÃÈVÊÀi“>ÃÌiÀi`°Ê /…ˆÃÊÛiÀȜ˜Ê…>ÃÊÌÜiiŽi`ÊۜV>ÃÊ>˜`Ê Ã«>VˆiÀÊ«Àœ`ÕV̈œ˜ÊLÕÌÊ̅iʅˆ}…ˆ}…ÌÊ œvÊ̅iÊ`œÕLiÊV`ʈÃÊ̅iÊÀii>ÃiʜvÊœœÊ `i“œÃ°°°«ÀiÊ«Àœ`ÕV̈œ˜ÊÕLitÊ9œÕÊV>˜Ê …i>ÀÊ̅iʅՓ>˜ˆÌÞÊÕ«ÊVœÃiÊ>˜`ÊÀ>ÜoÊ “>ŽiÃÊޜÕÊܜ˜`iÀÊ܅ÞÊ̅iÞÊiÛiÀʅ>`Ê ÌœÊV…>˜}i°Ê­® 6ˆÃˆÌÊÜÜÜ°`iVœ`i“i`ˆ>°Vœ“ÊvœÀʓœÀiÊ ˆ˜ÌiÀۈiÜÃ]Ê}ˆ}Ê>˜`ÊV`ÊÀiۈiÜÃÊ>˜`ÊÌœÊ Ài}ˆÃÌiÀÊvœÀʜÕÀʓœ˜Ì…ÞʘiÜÏiÌÌiÀ°

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Royal West of England Academy

23 October - 10 December

153 Autumn Exhibition A vibrant exhibition of over 500 works of painting, print-making, sculpture and architecture. This popular annual show comprises an eclectic mix of styles, media and subjects.

Adults £3.00 concession £2.00 children free Free admission to shows in the New Galler y www.rwa.org.uk

Visual Arts

Andrew Stonyer ‘Time within the Hour’

Queen’s Road Clifton Bristol 0117 973 5129 10.00-5.30 Mon-Sat 2.00-5.00 Sunday

19 FEATURE»FILM “WE LIVE IN A WORLD OF ILLUSION. THE GREAT TASK IN LIFE IS TO FIND REALITY.”

VISION & VERITÉ BUT WHAT’S BRINGING DOCUMENTARY TO A CINEMA NEAR YOU? BY ROSIE GREATOREX

N

ot long ago, I sat in a packed room with no air conditioning and seats in cramped rows, to watch a no-budget non-fiction film about the life of a small, impoverished Peruvian family. Actually, I hadn’t just gatecrashed my little sister’s human geography GCSE classroom (although the material wouldn’t have been out of place) – I had queued for almost an hour and paid £6 for the privilege of watching the film, Compadré, because I was at the ICA’s Human Rights International Film Festival. When the film was over, I dried my eyes as I left the auditorium, and went to have some over-priced pasta in Covent Garden. This experience will be familiar to many of you, if the rise and rise of documentary cinema, even in Bath, is anything to go by. In the last few years, at the Little Theatre Cinema alone, you may have had the good fortune to see one or more of a huge number of quality documentary films: Bowling for Columbine, 2002 (gun culture in the US), Etre et Avoir, 2003 (school children in rural France), Fog of War, 2003 (high-level war mongering in the US), Spellbound, 2003 (geeky spelling-bee kids), Capturing the Friedmans, 2003 (alleged paedophilia in a typical American family), Touching the Void, 2003 (fool-hardy Brits escaping mountain-related certain death after rope-cutting incident), Super Size Me 2004 (Maccy – D related illness), The The Friedmans Corporation, 2004 (global capitalism as Capturing Director: Andrew Jarecki, 2003 dominant ideology), and, of course the biggie, in terms of box-office revenue (and newspaper column inches) Fahrenheit 9/11, 2004 (highly suspect machinations of the Bush empire in the run up to the Iraq invasion). I haven’t even mentioned any of the titles in the documentary strand of the excellent Bath Film Festival. And any film festival worth it’s goodie bags (OK, the BFF don’t do goodie bags) has a doc’s section anyway, these days – that is, if it isn’t a documentary film festival. Today, documentary cinema is big business. And you know the big studios

and distributors have seen gold in them there hills when a subsidiary of Disney has been persuaded to distribute a documentary undermining the whole US political system, not to mention the monkey at the top. Even the sluggish and under-resourced UK Film Council has backed documentary making here in the UK; it was on to a winner with director Kevin McDonald? – Touching the Void took a record £1.68m at British box offices. The story of two adventurers struggling against the elements on the Peruvian Andes (shot partly in High Definition) beat Michael Moore’s investigation into the proliferation of pre-adolescent gun crime (Bowling for Columbine) to the top spot of best selling British documentary 2004. Never-the-less, it has been that rotund champion of leftist politics, with his robust, tabloid-style journalism – whether you’re enamoured of his film-making or not – who has really opened the flood-gates for the low-budget documentaries making it out of the festival circuit and onto a screen near you in the early twenty-first century. Cinema’s traditional realm of fantasy, of suspension of disbelief and acceptance of unreality, seems far removed from the experience of watching a documentary feature. Paying to see a feature length factual film would seem to give you more in common with the pre-cinema Victorians than the rest of the popcorn-munching population. They too lined the pews (of their local churches) to hear a rollicking good sermon, and have their moral sensibilities and social consciences aroused. In contrast, the cinema experience has always been about escapism and spectacle – ever since the days of silent films appearing as crowd-pleasing novelties in music hall acts – and, unlike the small domestic screen (the cinema’s main rival for decades now), it’s demanding. Compare the interactivity, the pause-itwhile-I-get-some-toast-ability of DVD, to going to the cinema. You’ll sit in that big dark, space in the silent company of strangers and that big old flickering intellect quarterly | 19

20 FEATURE»FILM “I LOVE ACTING. IT IS SO MUCH MORE REAL THAN LIFE.”

‘CINEMA’S TRADITIONAL REALM OF FANTASY SEEMS FAR REMOVED FROM THE EXPERIENCE OF WATCHING A DOCUMENTARY FEATURE.’ screen demands from you what it has from over a century of audiences, with their upturned faces and craning necks – your undivided attention (apart from that melting packet of Revels and the flat Pepsi, of course). March 1895, the dawn of cinema. Louis Lumiere demonstrated his new invention, the cinématographe. Film theorist Erik Barnouw later commented, in a charmingly concise and academic way, ‘The familiar, seen anew in this way, brought astonishment’. The film Erik was talking about was La Sortie des Usines – a reel of film showing Lumiere’s own workers leaving the factory. What amazed the audiences in the Vaudevilles and Nickelodeons was the familiar world being replayed to them in moving image. It would take a long time before that flickering picture became so commonplace that the narrative could take the foreground. Since this first snippet of real-life on film (and what cinephile doesn’t get goosebumps thinking about the first time those working men filed nonchalantly across the screen) documentary has been integral to the development of cinema. Look no further than the French New Wave. In fact, watch any sixties European Art film with those louche, beautiful teenagers lounging around doing nothing and remember the 1000s of feet of wasted film of kids goofing about – on the cutting room floors of humble docuSuper Size Me mentary makers everywhere. In fact, the Director: Morgan Spurlock, 2004 mighty Jean-Luc Godard’s first short film was a doc, Operation Beton, (1954) – he said he never left behind those elements of the documentary form. That movement’s term ‘Cinema Verité’, coined in 1960, is a tribute to the soviet documentary film-maker Dziga Vertov – it’s a direct translation of his term ‘Kino Pravda’. It has often been the challenges and limitations peculiar to the documentary form that have pushed forward innovations in the industry as a whole, and not just in terms of style. Working flexibly on location (it took a long time for Holly | intellect quarterly

wood to follow, and cautiously leave the studio behind) in unpredictable and uncontrolled conditions, under a restricted budget and timescale, and with a necessity for rigorous research and ground work in pre-production, it is hardly surprising that it has been documentary makers who have innovated first, and best. In the fifties, for example, Auricon 16mm 100ft cameras had their tops sheared off by anthropological camera crews filming on location, so that they could take up to 400ft of film, and the natural flow of the interview process not be interrupted. Only last summer, at the UK opening of The Motorcycle Diaries I heard director Walter Salles praising the 16mm camera that allowed him to shoot non-actors with a camera that was not so bulky as to be intrusive or inhibit natural behaviour. The film, like countless others, has been heavily influenced by documentary style, and technique. Looking to the future, the high-definition camera techniques successfully pioneered in Touching The Void will eventually change the way fiction films are made forever. The Little Theatre hasn’t shown this much documentary cinema since World War Two – when it was running as a news cinema with the same reel of footage and stilted voice-over reportage being repeated several times a day and changed two or three times a week. Twenty, even ten years ago, documentary was stuff of serious television – a requisite part of ‘worthy’ broadcast scheduling – it didn’t play at the cinema, because you had Panorama (or some hour-long well-researched programme featuring John Pilger) instead. Why the move away from television, and back to cinema? It’s hard to resist the simplistic historical parallel. During the war, in the best interests of war-time public moral, the BBC were rationing (and heavily censoring) the news reports from the front, so the cinema became a vital source of information for the community. It would be stretching the point

21 FEATURE»FILM “REAL LIFE SEEMS TO HAVE NO PLOT.”

‘IT IS TO THE CREDIT OF THE CINEMA GOING POPULATION THAT THEY ARE PREPARED TO PAY MORE THAN A FIVER A GO FOR INFORMATION AND OPINIONS THAT THEIR LICENSE FEE NO LONGER AFFORDS THEM.’ to suggest that the cheap, crappy state of current affairs television programming is a government ploy to pull the fluffy stuff over our collective peepers, but when the six o’clock news is indistinguishable from genius spoof The Day Today, is it surprising that we get the feeling we’re missing something? Documentary has an historical affiliation to the political Left – with the dishonourable exception of Nationalist propaganda films. So at a time when civil liberties are being curtailed in response to a nebulous threat to national security (illegal wars do tend to make us all feel a little jumpy, mind), it is to the credit of the cinema going population that they are prepared to pay more than a fiver a go for information and opinions that their license fee no longer affords them. Television schedules are currently propped up by a swathe of salacious, cheaply-made Reality TV shows. I’m Americas Most Wanted Celebrity Brother Swap? Get me out of here. But nothing sells like a freak show. Do you honestly watch Wife Swap because it’s an interesting social experiment, or to laugh at overweight overworked track-suited wives arguing with weird uptight snooty husbands? Ironically it’s this ultra-conservative television programming which has ultimately paved the way for documentary to move into the mainstream. If you can watch Bez zoned out on a sofa for hours on end, wandering in and out of a grainy shot – you’ll be able to watch a foreign language documentary no problem. { Rosie Greatorex works in London for Picturehouse Cinemas.

FURTHER READING

The Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to Reality TV and Beyond Edited by Geoff King | £19.95 / $39.95 ‘A genuinely trans-disciplinary text that provides a rich framework within which to think about spectacle in the 21st century.’ Available now.

Top Fog of War Director: Errol Morris, 2003 Above Spellbound Director: Jeffrey Blitz, 2003

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22 FEATURE»FILM “DRAMA IS LIFE WITH THE DULL BITS CUT OUT.”

Q&A DANIEL LINDVALL PHOTO: MAGNUS ÖHNNER

What brought you to be involved with the Film International journal? I met Michael when I started off as a Ph.D. student at Lund University in the mid-1990s. A couple of years later, he took over as editor of what was then Filmhäftet, and I believe I wrote a review for the very first issue he edited back in 1998 as well as a critical essay on David Bordwell’s and Noël Carroll’s book Post-theory for the second. From then on, I’ve been writing more or less regularly for what was then Filmhäftet, and, now Film International. When Michael introduced the Guest Editor scheme, I was the first to take this opportunity, putting together an issue on questions of class which was also the second issue of Film International (2003:2). So when the idea of forming an Editorial Board came up it was natural that I would volunteer to take part. How do you feel the literature & broader media, carrying work on cinema have changed in the last ten years?  | intellect quarterly

It seems to me that cinema studies and intellectual thinking on film culture has gone through three stages over the post-war period. First there was the auteur-phase which was all about establishing cinema as a ‘true’ art form and the study of it as a ‘serious’ project. Though there was something superficially rebellious about studying films and writing intellectually about them, this was still a conservative project at heart. Then came the late sixties and the seventies with their ‘apparatus’ theories and Frankfurt School sociology. Ostensibly, this was a materialist turn, bringing in sociological and historical interests in film studies, but unfortunately it became all theory and no fact, so reality – social contexts – actually disappeared before they’d arrived. Making things even worse was the extremely elitist, one-sided, view of (working class) audiences as passive and gullible. Thirdly, the eighties and nineties saw the heyday of postmodernism. Postmodernism tended to simply reverse

‘I HOPE THAT OUR JOURNAL, FILM INTERNATIONAL, WILL BE ABLE TO BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN THE ACADEMY AND THE OUTSIDE WORLD.’ the theories of the seventies. Suddenly audiences were all-powerful and the hierarchies turned upside down. However, as postmodernism dissolved the material foundations of culture, it became as incapable of dealing with the real world as the ‘apparatus’ theories. Today I’m quietly optimistic. I

think the time has come for film studies to achieve a balanced and dialectical relationship between fact and theory. This has to do both with film studies having reached a certain maturity – a self confidence with what’s going on in the outside world.

23 FEATURE»FILM FURTHER INFO. ON INTELLECT BOOKS & JOURNALS: WWW.INTELLECTBOOKS.COM

‘WE NEED TO KEEP ASKING SIMPLE QUESTIONS, LIKE WHO GETS TO MAKE FILMS AND WHO GETS TO BE REPRESENTED ON THE SCREEN, AND HOW.’ With respect to these changes, what are qualities that Film International brings to the cinema media? I hope that we will be able to bridge the gap between the academy and the outside world. That we will include both presentations of academic research written in an accessible style, and good investigative journalism alongside texts written by those actually involved with the creative process – whether in Hollywood or in the ‘indy’ media. We are looking to become truly international rather than ‘western european’ or ‘transatlantic’. I believe that it may well be an advantage here that Film International is based in a small, nonanglophone country as this all but makes it impossible for us to slide into becoming a pseudo-national journal. I also like to think of Film International as a journal dealing with moving images from a multidisciplinary perspective, not just a ‘film studies journal’. What do you consider to be the most important debates and discussions that now need to take place around cinema? In many ways the most important issues are the same as they always were, informed by contemporary historical circumstances. In the light of both the ‘war on terror’ and the consolidation of the distribution oligopoly, we need to look at all types of censorship mechanisms –

public, corporate, self-censorship, religious and community censorship, and so on. We need to keep asking simple questions, like who gets to make films and who gets to be represented on the screen, and how. How does the process of globalization affect the possibilities of selfrepresentation for those outside of the Triad-countries, for instance? And what new stereotypes are created by contemporary political and economic realities? (In Sweden today, a typical ‘pillar of the community’ was recently allowed to claim that ‘Serbs have been an inherently evil people for the last thousand years’ on national radio, almost without any public reaction. If he had been talking about Jews, for instance, he would have ended up in court.) We also need to look critically at new technologies, examine continuously how they are actually put to use, without falling into either of the naïve prejudices that they must be either inherently progressive and democratical, or the opposite. I would also like to see more of reception studies to help cinema studies take the discussion of how films actually function beyond the idealism of both the apparatus theories of the seventies and the postmodernism of the eighties and nineties, and move it into the arena of real social practice.

What are you and the rest of the Film International editorial team working on at present beyond Film International? I’m a freelance writer and am also working on my Ph.D. thesis. The same goes for Michael, who works regularly as a film critic for a major daily. Anna Arnman recently completed her thesis, on Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, and I believe she is considering a book project at the moment. Martin and Per have both studied at Lund University also. What do you consider to be the best achievement you have witnessed on screen in the last twelve months? A very difficult question. Nothing very recent really jumps to my mind. My first thought was Walter Salles’s The Motorcycle Diaries, though I suppose it’s slightly older than twelve months by now. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised at how this film managed to give a very human portrait of Che, rather than giving us either the pseudodivine super hero, or the commodified icon of a million branded T-shirts (perhaps partly because they did not choose an actor that resembled Che that much). Instead of this, it became a kind of toned down, reflective epic on Latin America that felt very timely considering contemporary developments (at least from an outsider’s point of view). { From January 2006 Intellect will be publishing Film International as a full colour bimonthly magazine. To order a free sample copy please e-mail: [email protected]

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24 FEATURE»FILM “AMERICA IS NOT A MELTING POT. IT IS A SIZZLING CAULDRON.”

CRASH AND THE CITY RACE & RAGE ON THE STREETS OF L.A. BY PAUL GORMLEY

T

he French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once wrote that ‘the American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies’ by which he meant that the experience of visiting an American city itself is one that is produced directly by experiencing it at the cinema first. Any tourist who has seen the steam rising from manhole covers in New York as yellow cabs roll over them or have dared to negotiate Los Angeles freeways or have even stood by the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco will know the feelings to which Baudrillard is referring – a confusing mixture of stored memory-images and bodily affect that can leave the tourist reeling, such is the intoxicating power of celluloid America. Yet one of the biggest challenges facing Hollywood narrative film in the recent years has been producing the contemporary American city on screen. The fragmented milieus, different ethnicities, myriad, disconnected spaces and speed of the late twentieth and twenty-first century city and urban cultures do not lend themselves easily to traditional modes of Hollywood storytelling and images, concerned as they are with linear narratives, chronological structures of cause and effect and the actions of an individual hero or (less often) heroine at the centre. The films of the period of so-called Classical Hollywood cinema tended to produce a homogenous space where an individual could act and affect the entire milieu of the city whether through the

 | intellect quarterly

Top Officer Ryan (Matt Dillon) saves a reluctant Christine (Thandie Newton) from the fire Bottom Cameron (Terrence Howard) makes a decision

criminal actions of James Cagney in classic gangster films like The Public Enemy or the skewed intentions of the hard-boiled cop and detective of the more fragmented noir period. However the most influential films of the last 30 years have tended to eschew singular linear plot lines and characters in favour of a circular structure that plays with chronology and have multiple characters and plotlines, with dramatic centres dispersed throughout rather than as culmination of the narrative. Arguably Scorsese’s 1970s films such as Mean Streets and Taxi Driver and Altman’s Nashville have been most significant in this respect – though the work of John Cassavetes in films like Shadows influenced both these directors. These films began to realize that the dream of the American city as melting point was a fantasy borne out of a repression of racial diversity and rage. More contemporary films have tended to focus on Los Angeles as the city where this fragmentation is most marked in contemporary America. Films like Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down, Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Altman’s own Short Cuts and Paul Anderson’s Magnolia have produced Los Angeles as a city where individual actions and causes and effects are localized and often disconnected. Bubbling beneath (or in Falling Down’s case over the top) the surface of these films is the idea that the visibility of ethnic diversity has fundamentally damaged certain central tenets of the American dream

25 FEATURE»FILM “LOS ANGELES SEVENTYTWO SUBURBS IN SEARCH OF A CITY.”

– most notably that the actions of an individual are significant and have the power to produce a profound effect on the milieu or community in which that individual is situated. Characters in these films tend to be ultimately powerless in terms of intentionally having a significant effect on the cinematic worlds they inhabit – even if, as is the case with the Michael Douglas character in Falling Down (a latter-day relation to Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver), they still have the psychotic fantasy of recognizing and being recognized by the various constituents of the modern American city. Underlying this powerlessness, particularly in Taxi Driver and Falling Down, is an often un-

plotlines of the film where a multitude of characters with different ethnicities and classes come into violent conflict with each other in various life-changing ways. Indeed the film attempts to cover all classes and ethnic bases in its narrative strands. Crash begins at its narrative end with Walters and his Mexican partner and lover, Ria (Jennifer Esposito), finding a man’s body by the side of the road who eventually turns out to be Walter’s missing brother (Larenz Tate). We then flash back 24 hours to meet other characters including an unhinged Iranian shopkeeper who in a mood of post September 11 anxiety attempts to buy a gun for protection and comes into

can-American representation in film up to the significant influence of the short-lived blaxploitation and hood films of the seventies and nineties respectively. The diminished power of white American identity is most apparent in the storyline involving Matt Dillon’s character, Ryan. In many ways Ryan is the contemporary descendant of American anti-heroes whose ability to act is underpinned and undermined by their racial rage. There are elements of Ethan Edwards (The Searchers), Travis Bickle, and Dfens in Ryan as he attempts to solve his problems in the manner of an American ‘action-taker’, culminating in the rescue of Thandie Newton from a burning car while unable to repress his racial rage. White paranoia around racial difference, miscegenation and the loss of power is embodied in all of these characters and they all expose the fact these anxieties and racial rage underpin the action-taking individual of the American dream and its cinematic counterpart. The African-American characters all accept this notion of a powerlessness to overcome social and political obstacles, whether it is the characters played by Thandie Newton and Terrence Howard accepting that they cannot single-handedly defeat the institutionalized racism they encounter, despite their class privileges, or the black detective Graham Walters in bringing together his family and winning their mother’s love. All these characters accept a localized, negotiated and contingent degree of power in the city and in this way Crash is indebted to black aesthetics of ‘realism’ as they are played out in the powerlessness of the characters in ‘hood films like the Hughes Brothers’ Menace II Society (1993). Indeed like many American urban films of the 1990s, Crash borrows its aesthetics of local spaces within the city from the localized borders and tensions of the ‘hood as produced in the ‘hood film. The film is less convincing when it en-

‘CRASH EXPLICITLY LAYS BARE THE POLITICAL AND HOLLYWOOD NARRATIVE FANTASY OF THE U.S. CITY AS MELTING POT, WHERE THE ACTIONS OF AN INDIVIDUAL CAN OVERCOME OBSTACLES AND AFFECT THE ENTIRE WORLD OF THE FILM.’ spoken white racial rage demonstrated by Travis’ desire for a biblical rain to ‘clean the scum off the streets’ and in Michael Douglas’ DFens to ‘go home’ and resume his ‘all-American’ family life. The recent American film release Crash, directed and partly written by Paul Haggis, is the latest attempt to put Los Angeles at its centre. Unlike most of the films mentioned above, the question of race and ethnic division as the cause for the diminishing of the powers of the old American cinematic hero and his dream is explicit in the various narrative strands of the film and its moments of attempted cinematic affect. The film opens with a dreamlike sequence where an African-American detective, Graham Walters (Don Cheadle) in the aftermath of a car crash muses on the disconnected and alienated experience of contemporary Los Angeles. He notes that in New York City you can walk around the city and brush into people, but in Los Angeles you just drive around and nobody touches you – until you crash into them. This statement underlies the various

conflict with a Mexican locksmith. Two African-American men (Tate and Chris Bridges) debate the stereotyping of themselves as criminals before hijacking the car of a district attorney and his wife (Brendan Fraser and Sandra Bullock). Finally a racist cop (Matt Dillon) sexually harasses the wife of an affluent television producer (Thandie Newton and Terrence Howard) after pulling them over. Throughout the action, the film brings to boil the various racial paranoia and anxieties that these encounters spark off and explicitly lays bare the political and Hollywood narrative fantasy of the American city as melting pot where the actions of an individual can overcome obstacles and affect the entire world of the film. Perhaps unsurprisingly it is in the conflict between African-American and white American identities that the film is most successful in laying bare the racialised fantasy of the American dream and Hollywood narrative aesthetics – unsurprising because this is the conflict that has been at the heart of American cinema since the marginalisation of Afri-

intellect quarterly | 25

026FEATUREFILM 26 FILM»FEATURE EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW LIVING ALONE

FURTHER INFO. ON INTELLECT BOOKS & JOURNALS: WWW.INTELLECTBOOKS.COM

FURTHER READING

The NewBrutality Film: Race and Affect in Contemporary American Cinema By Paul Gormley £19.95 / $39.95 Above Dist. Attourney Richard Cabot (Brendan Fraser) calls home

Above Detective Graham Walters (Don Cheadle) makes a discovery

‘IN TERMS OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY THE CHARACTER OF THE IRANIAN SHOPKEEPER IS PERHAPS THE MOST DISTURBING, DEPICTED AS A DERANGED, PARANOID INDIVIDUAL WHO IS ONLY REDEEMED BY WHAT HE BELIEVES IS A MYSTICAL ACT OF GOD.’ gages with more recent threats to the question of American identity in the city, notably in the case of the character of the Iranian shopkeeper and the various Hispanic characters of the film. In the case of the latter group all the characters are ‘good’ and honourable, again attempting to negotiate the fragmented city in a ‘realistic’ fashion, perhaps betraying the film’s liberal sentiments at a time when white paranoia around Los Angeles becoming a predominantly Hispanic city is at its height. In terms of contemporary American foreign policy the character of the Iranian shopkeeper is perhaps the most disturbing, depicted as a deranged, paranoid individual who is only redeemed by what he believes is a mystical act of God. Western media images of the Middle East as being full of deranged and fanatical peoples are not really challenged by this portrait, and the contemporary threat to the western city remains at the door of this other in the overall affect of the film. Nevertheless the overall affect of Crash does prolong the pertinence of Baudrillard’s  | intellect quarterly

comments around the connection between the American cinema and its celluloid significance and offers a necessarily updated experience of contemporary Los Angeles. { Paul Gormley is Field Leader of Media, Communication and Screen Studies at the University of East London and has just published The New-Brutality Film: Race and Affect in Contemporary American Cinema (Intellect 2005).

TELL US WHAT YOU THINK! IQ IS LOOKING FOR YOUR FEEDBACK. SEND YOUR LETTERS AND COMMENTS TO: IQINTELLECTBOOKS.COM

The 1990s saw the emergence of a new kind of American cinema, which this book calls the ‘new-brutality film’. Violence and race have been at the heart of Hollywood cinema since its birth, but the new-brutality film was the first kind of popular American cinema to begin making this relationship explicit. The rise of this cinema coincided with the rebirth of a long-neglected strand of film theory, which seeks to unravel the complex relations of affect between the screen and the viewer. The book argues that films like Falling Down, Reservoir Dogs and Se7en sought to reanimate the affective impact of white Hollywood cinema by miming the power of African-American and particularly hip-hop culture. Available now.

Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema By Pat Brereton £19.95 / $39.95 Utopianism, alongside its more prevalent dystopian opposite together with ecological study has become a magnet for interdisciplinary research. The book applies a range of interdisciplinary strategies to trace the evolution of ecological representations in Hollywood film from 1950s to the present, which has not been done on this scale before. Many popular science fiction, westerns, nature and road movies, as listed in the filmography are extensively analysed while particularly privileging ecological moments of sublime expression often dramatized in the closing moments of these films. Available now.

27 INSPIRATION» “IN LIFE YOU NEED EITHER INSPIRATION OR DESPERATION.”

THE TRUE PRISON KEN SAROWIWA NIGERIA, 1993

‘I AM A MAN OF IDEAS IN AND OUT OF PRISON  MY IDEAS WILL LIVE.’

It is not the leaking roof Nor the singing mosquitoes In the damp, wretched cell It is not the clank of the key As the warden locks you in It is not the measly rations Unfit for beast or man Nor yet the emptiness of day Dipping into the blankness of night It is not It is not It is not It is the lies that have been drummed Into your ears for a generation It is the security agent running amok Exciting callous calamitous orders In exchange for a wretched meal a day The magistrate writing into her book A punishment she knows is undeserved The moral decrepitude The mental ineptitude The meat of dictators Cowardice masking as obedience Lurking in our denigrated souls It is fear damping trousers That we dare not wash It is this It is this It is this Dear friend, turns our free world Into a dreary prison Ken Saro-Wiwa was one of Nigeria’s most beloved writers. Poet, novelist and screenplay writer, his work won both critical and popular acclaim. He was executed by hanging in Nigeria on 10 November 1995. He was arrested the previous year and charged with incitement to murder. He was an outspoken critic of successive military governments and a defendant of the Ogoni tribe, of which he was a member.

RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING

Theatre in Prison Paper, 224 pp. £24.95/$49.95

Radical Initiatives in Interventionist & Community Drama Paper, 158 pp. £14.95/$29.95

African Theatre for Development Paper, 160 pp. £14.95/$29.95

The poem above is taken from the book Theatre in Prison edited by Michael Balfour. intellect quarterly | 27

28 HOLOPOETRY» “TEXTS TRANSFORM THEMSELVES AND MOVE IN SPACE”

TOP “HOLO/OLHO” (HOLO/EYE), 25X30 CM, REFLECTION HOLOGRAMS MOUNTED ON WOOD AND PLEXIGLASS, 1983. COLLECTION UECLAA, UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX, UK. BOTTOM “MAYBE THEN, IF ONLY AS”, 30 X 40 CM, DIGITAL HOLOGRAM, 1993.

 | intellect quarterly

TOP “CHAOS”, 30 X 40 CM, REFLECTION HOLOGRAM, 1986. COLLECTION MIT MUSEUM, CAMBRIDGE, MA. BOTTOM “ZEPHYR”, 30 X 40 CM, DIGITAL HOLOGRAM, 1993.

29 HOLOPOETRY» “WHAT IS AT STAKE IS A GENUINE HOLOGRAPHIC SYNTAX”

HOLOPOETRY EXPLAINED TEXT AND ALL IMAGES BY EDUARDO KAC Holopoetry investigates the nature of language and its relationship to visuality, issues that are of interest both to literature and the visual arts. Holopoems are holograms that address language both as material and subject matter.

TOP “AMALGAM”, 10 X 7.5 CM, WHITE LIGHT REFLECTION HOLOGRAM, 1990. UNNUMBERED EDITION OF 100. BOTTOM “SOUVENIR D’ANDROMEDA”, 30 X 40 CM, DIGITAL HOLOGRAM, 1990.

I create visual texts which can only signify upon the active perceptual and cognitive engagement on the part of the reader or viewer. This ultimately means that each reader “writes” his or her own texts as he or she looks at the piece. My holopoems don’t rest quietly on the surface. When the viewer starts to look for words and their links, the texts will transform themselves, move in three-dimensional space, change in color and meaning, coalesce and disappear. This viewer-activated choreography is as much a part of the signifying process as the transforming verbal and visual elements themselves. Language plays a fundamental role in the constitution of our experiential world. To question the structure of language is to investigate how realities are constructed. My holograms define a linguistic experience that takes place outside syntax and conceptualize instability as a key signifying agent. I use digital holography to blur the frontier between words and images and to create an animated syntax that stretches words beyond their meaning in ordinary discourse. I employ computer animation techniques to create a new kind of visual-poetic composition, which undermines fixed states (i.e., words charged visually or images enriched verbally) and which could be defined as a constant oscillation between them. Holopoems are both an investigation of the processes of language and of holographic meaning. The use of digital holography as a writing medium reflects my desire to create experimental texts that move language, and more specifically, written language, beyond the linearity and rigidity that characterize its printed form. I never adapt existing texts to holography. I try to investigate the possibility of creating works that emerge from a genuine holographic syntax. { Media Poetry: The first international anthology to document a radically new poetry which takes language beyond the confines of the printed page into a non-linear world of digital interactivity and hyperlinkage. Available late 2006. intellect quarterly | 29

30 EDUCATION» “A SENSE OF CURIOSITY IS NATURE’S ORIGINAL SCHOOL OF EDUCATION.”

HAND TO MOUSE ROSEMARY SASSOON ASKS ‘WILL THE COMPUTER KILL OFF HANDWRITING?’ ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAMES BOURNE

 | intellect quarterly

S

ome people are already beginning to suggest that the skill of handwriting is redundant in the computer age. It would be better, however, to consider the two forms of communication complementary for the time being. The computer certainly has influenced the way we use handwriting. Students no longer have to submit essays that were tediously and often painfully written by hand and then, at times, illegible to the reader. We have to thank the computer for saving our hands from a task that was asking too much from them – to perform detailed and precise movements, at great speed, for a considerable length of time, and frequently under conditions of extreme tension. This was resulting in increasing incidence of pain, even the old complaint of writer’s cramp. Handwriting is tedious and time consuming to learn and perceived as difficult to teach by those who have never been adequately taught themselves and worse still not been taught how to teach it with confidence. These problems can be overcome if the altered usage and priorities for a written script are understood. Our kids, our students, don’t need traditionally neat, slow handwriting for show, but a flexible personal hand to fill in the gaps in their life that the computer does not adequately meet. So when it comes to teaching only essentials need be dealt with – but those need to be taught intensively at the start of school. Some of the time saved could then be spent in teaching young children keyboard skills. For those with disabilities and real handwriting problems a computer is an essential tool and often the key to academic progress. Think about how you were taught – has it met your needs? Were you ever shown how to be comfortable, how to sit and where to place your paper so that you were on the way to pain free, relaxed writing habits? Perhaps you remember being told that there is only one correct way to hold your pen? That is not true today. Modern pens function at a different elevation to fountain pens or pencils. That often means that penholds need to adapt and is why we see such a plethora of unconventional penholds. Some work well but some slow down the writer or become painful under pressure of speed. Writing and writing strategies should be taught in such a way today to consider writers and their needs. In the past it was the reader that got all the consideration. Examinations still have to be written by hand. Note taking is the other main task where handwriting is useful if not essential. Anything from lecture notes to taking down a phone message (when there is no computer around) or a shopping list needs to be legible for the

31 EDUCATION» FURTHER INFO. ON INTELLECT BOOKS & JOURNALS: WWW.INTELLECTBOOKS.COM

writer at a later date. It may be amusing when your partner misreads your scrawled shopping list and brings back the wrong commodity – but it is more likely to start a row, because to criticise your handwriting is to criticise yourself. Our script is the visible trace of our bodies recorded when we have a pen in our hand and it is in contact with the paper. It is a reflection of our self on paper. That is why a personal letter brings to mind the writer so vividly

‘HANDWRITING IS A REFLECTION OF OUR SELF ON PAPER. THAT IS WHY A PERSONAL LETTER BRINGS TO MIND THE WRITER SO VIVIDLY  EVEN YEARS AFTER DEATH.’ – even years after death. Would a love letter be as meaningful if sent by e-mail? Does a text message mean quite as much as a handwritten note of apology? That would signal that, at least, you were taking time from your technologically run life to stop and think of the recipient. The computer is affecting the way we write in another sense, for better or worse. Spell checks and grammar correction is available at the click of a mouse. We are making life easier but with each function that we rely on the computer to perform we are allowing our own memory to deteriorate. This has been happening ever since the written word evolved partially replacing human memory. Now the computer is accelerating the decline of memory rather like greenhouse gases are accelerating global warming. You might think that I am just a lobbyist for handwriting or a computer-hater. Far from it. I would be lost without my Mac. Some years ago I had a stroke. I write books so the first thing I needed to know was could I use a computer one-handed? Then, at least, I could carry on working from my wheel chair. In the past I had heard from patients that I met in the course of my hospital work what a deprivation it was not to be able to write by hand. Now I experienced something of what they felt. For many it meant that someone else had to conduct much of their business particularly anything requiring a signature. In recent years technology has provided solutions for some

of these problems. Although a consistent signature is no longer quite as essential for security purposes, not everything has changed. Anyhow the distress of not being able to make your mark is considerable. Just recently I had a mature student come to see me whose handwriting problems meant she could not fill in the necessary security forms to apply for a job. Those who design such forms do not consider how small and precise your writing must be – and you cannot use a computer to fill them in. They are designed for the computer to read with little consideration for the writer. It seems we have gone full circle. Inevitably, improved technology will help future generations to communicate more easily without a written script – if they wish. However, we have a way to go before we pronounce the death of handwriting. The only sure way of achieving that is to stop teaching it. {

OTHER BOOKS BY ROSEMARY SASSOON

The Art & Science of Handwriting Paper, 192 pp. £14.95/$29.95

Dr Rosemary Sassoon is a prolific researcher, writer and international lecturer, and works as an independent consultant. For more information about James Bourne visit: www.drawer.me.uk

Computers and Typography 2 Paper, 158 pp. £14.95/$29.95

The Acquisition of a Second Handwriting System Paper, 160 pp. £14.95/$29.95

intellect quarterly | 31

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

INTELLECT PUBLISHED ITS FIRST JOURNAL IN 1986 AND ITS FIRST BOOK IN 1987. SINCE THEN WE HAVE SERVED THE ACADEMIC COMMUNITY BY PUBLISHING AUTHORS AND EDITORS WITH ORIGINAL THINKING. AS WE CONTINUE TO GROW, WE ARE SEEKING NEW AUTHORS AND EDITORS WITH A STRONG COMMITMENT TO THEIR IDEAS. BEING AN ACADEMIC PUBLISHER, ALL OUR MANUSCRIPTS ARE SUBJECT TO PEER REVIEW. WE COMMISSION WITHOUT RESPECT TO WHETHER THERE IS AN ESTABLISHED READERSHIP FOR THE IDEAS. WE SUPPORT OUR AUTHORS TO ARTICULATE THEIR THOUGHTS, AND THEN BRING THEM TO THEIR FULL POTENTIAL READERSHIP IN PRINT AND IN ELECTRONIC FORM. WE CHOOSE AUTHORS AND EDITORS WHO ARE WILLING TO BE A PART OF OUR PUBLISHING PROCESS, BACKING THEIR IDEAS BY INVESTING THEIR ENERGY AND RESOURCES AS NEEDED AND IN COOPERATION WITH US. OUR PUBLISHING PROGRAMME FOCUSES ON TOPICS RELATED TO CREATIVE MEDIA, SUCH AS: ART, FILM, TV, DESIGN, EDUCATION, LANGUAGE, GENDER STUDY & INTERNATIONAL CULTURE. CONTACT ME IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO JOIN OUR COMMUNITY OF EXCEPTIONAL AUTHORS AND EDITORS, I LOOK FORWARD TO HEARING FROM YOU. MASOUD YAZDANI PUBLISHER MASOUDINTELLECTBOOKS.COM