That art – at least cinema – is to the media what philosophy is to science. Concerned about everything outside its grasp.
Humanity also has a question
“Killing a man is a crime. Killing a race is a question. Each government has its question. We answer: Humanity has its question too. Bigger than India, England, Russia. It is the baby in its mother’s belly.”
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Liberal Children of Nature
Well … for some reason embedding flash videos is, if not outright impossible, not exactly easy either, on this site. But the link below is definitely worth clicking:
One of the finest music videos ever made in Iceland, hosted here since, predictably, Youtube could not tolerate the nudity. Not only does it attack the most obvious national symbol joyfully, the Icelandic flag, but even the more subtle but no less holy insignia of economic independence: the cod. There is an image of fish on every coin of Icelandic currency – urinating in a cod’s mouth is as hardcore as it gets.
No less than this, however, I am just thrilled about the colors, the sexuality, the fun. It’s a bomb of joy. And if bureaucrats/businesspeople knew what they were saying, if they intended their words to have meaning, they would instantly see that this is the meaning of ‘liberal children of nature’, the phrase used to describe Icelanders in the Prime Ministry’s 2008 report on the ‘image of Iceland’.
The download or buffering may be slow, but definitely worth the wait. Band: Bárujárn. Song: Skuggasörf. Video: Kata and Steinunn.
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Bergman pixels —welcome to the zoo!
Chatroulette. 24/7 tens of thousands of people (when they stopped counting) sit around, the world over, click a button to share their private space with a stranger, gaze for a second, click again. Next. The world has been conquered by a staring contest. The anarchic kingdom of the eye.
The news has already been printed in all the big media: this beautifully simple, useless, funny and bergmanesque piece of software was conceived and coded by a 17 year old Russian. Bergmanesque … in a casino sort of way. Bergmanesque like Las Vegas (which it is, really).
Or what, what sort of cinema is this? Of course there is an absolute novelty to this – not to webcam chat as such, but the monumental amount of people gazing at strangers in different parts of the world … but that side, the logic of the communication, is still largely similar to old chat systems such as irc. The more substantial novelty is the cinematic aspect … if there is a voyeristic side to all cinematic experience, then this is it at its radical point zero. At the same time, most of the people that pop up on your screen really don’t seem to have a clue what they are doing there – thousands of people are waiting, right now, in front of a camera-equipped monitor, for each other to give their presence meaning or purpose. To explain what they are doing there. Click. Beckett? Click.
Not surprising: the number of males flagging their flesh once they appear on your screen. A river of hardons runs through it – and literally, the meat streaming through these channels at any given moment could probably make up a modest river at a gentle, steady flow. Not really surprising either is the male/female ratio of approximately 9/1. Which might change if those looking for eroticism would respect some etiquette.
Somewhat surprising is the number of males that will strum a guitar and sing a song for you. Which may seem even more perverse than that other rudimentary exhibitionism. Completely unexpected: interesting conversation is possible. Statistically that makes sense: Judging everyone by first appearances you can dismiss those people that don’t interest you at an enormous rate, probably as many as 600 individuals per hour or more. This relatively swift selection process means that, well, if there is an instant mutual agreement between you and only 1 in every 600 people on this planet that the two of you are worth talking to, it will only take an hour. In between: heaps of Bergmanesque boredom. 2nd class, certainly, but then that’s life.
But really, what does this thing tell us? At least that there is an undercurrent around the world of people who have some minimal desire of creating random, anonymous, casual relations with each other. This may not be any news, really, but not all revelations involve new information. In the last few years the internet has come to be i a continuation of our real world social experience rather than a break with it, through the strong tendency to attach online persona to your offline identity. The space that has been cracked open by Chatroulette and celebrated by these already staggering numbers of people, reveals an undercurrent of desire. A desire that wants to have no name.
That desire is not unknown to cinema-lovers. As French critic Serge Daney wrote, the reason he loved the cinema, as physical place, while he had nothing to do with theatre ever, was its anti-social nature: you sit there anonymous in the dark, and there is no remission during which you are supposed to socialize and give your opinions to people who may or may not consider you their peer. You sit, and then you leave, more often than not in silence – only entering the world in which you have a name and a continuous identity slowly. As the cinemas, in this sense, are already close to dead – there being no place in Iceland, for example, that screens films any grown up person should be interested in seeing – and the film festivals which replaced them certainly do not come without their share of social demands, it’s tempting to say that here is a place where you can again reach that elementary satisfaction of the movies. Without, however, a narrative, advanced cinematography or any aesthetics at all … pure cinema? Does the term finally have a valid meaning?
If it does, it might reveal that no, this was not what anyone was after. No more so than a rhinoceros is a unicorn. Rhinos still draw people to the zoo.
There we go! It’s a zoo. Check out the zoo. You are one of its curiosity items.
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This is the Bureau of Visual Compost, how may I help you?
An image is not strong because it is brutal or fantastic, but because the association of ideas is distant. Distant and just. – JL Godard.
Why is there no humanity in the images Icelandic media publish from Iraq? Literally, like no humans. Armed coalition soldiers, mostly American, yes. Dead and injured people, yes, although destroyed cars are more common. Perhaps those hit a nerve in the country of general Landcruiser ownership. But on election day, or when news hit about growing cancer rates – when anything else is newsworthy than car bombs or air strikes, all we get is the below.
A landscape? No, it’s not even a landscape, it’s unconscious, it’s nothing. Perhaps a soldier took his pocket camera along on a bomb raid, got some snapshots. The accompanying text is about the general elections taking place and people killed in an explosion. There’ s a lot of visual material in there. Images that actually reveal these slices of reality, show something, do exist, and are used by news agencies all around the world. They certainly have their ideological biases and limits, tend towards clichés etc. – but compared with what’s used in Icelandic web media, they seem infinitely rich.
The example above is not unfair or atypical, even if arbitrarily captured from RÚV’s website today. I went through news from Iraq on the website (Icelandic state radio) back to November 2009 – and the closest to a person I found was this:
A facile image today, if there ever was one – like air, u don’t even have to stop and notice, so common have these become.
Then there was this:
‘Terrorist attacks on election day’ the headline reads. No actual living people survived, but there are still functional hands in the country …
This is not necessarily due to any racist bias or any focused prejudices. The recent Dutch elections fare no better, visually:
– revealing, that while the elections were so and so, there are still windmills in Holland.
As RÚV’s managers don’t seem to notice any substantial difference between actual cinema and Disney’s 1000th variation on the My-dog-can-talk-or-at-least-think-in-voice-over! theme, this lack of images should come as no surprise. Director Grímur Hákonarson pointed out in a recent interview that being politically chosen and motivated, the managers of RÚV are highly interested in the names of local chieftains, less interested in literature – and one might safely add: unaware of the visual universe extending further than a shaved chin, necktie and mirror.
‘Christians demonstrate in Iraq’.
Breaking News! This urgent image just came in:
Newsroom ontology
The following, then, are the main categories of visual existence, according to the RÚV newsroom – a short random sample survey suggests that other local newsrooms pretty much follow the same classification, in varying proportions:
The main categories are: Local nature, often headlined. Politicians (mostly faces). Newsroom staff (also faces). Celebrity (bodies included). Money. Corporate identity and logos.
Car-related objects would be the odd one in today. The world outside Iceland remains largely a map-thing, with three main exceptions: Politicans and celebrity, of course, and then the outside world as a place of human suffering. However, even that minimal vision of humanity, the suffering animal, so prominent in media in general, seems to have become somewhat neglected recently, giving way for the suffering car and the demolished house.
A common feature is that the visuality is in most of these cases ordered from elsewhere – all those images are created and intended as images by another authority than the newsroom: corporate logos, celebrity, politicians’ faces – pictures of lost children from the police. No independent editorial policy or decision making is involved. No photographer’s passion to frame a slice of reality otherwise unseen. They show only those who have an interest in being seen, and serve that interest diligently. In terms of images the medium merely obeys the will of those with the means to impose it – be that show business or state authority.
Also noteworthy is that these exist more or less in isolation – items portrayed hardly ever relate to any other object, people or visual phenomena in the world. Only particulars are shown, and no relations drawn. In that way, the pictures are not so much photographs as icons – in the desktop computer sense – a heap of pixels saying little more than ‘click here’, making it a little easier to place the mouse on the correct news item than a single line of text does.
This is not really a matter of subtle ideological critique, but merely pointing out the blatantly obvious. Because of the absolute lack of imagery any visitor to RÚV’s website senses something akin to death approaching: so much inert material, doing nothing. With no explicit intention behind it, perhaps out of mere thoughtlessness, this lack functions as a closure, supporting the image of a universe consisting of Icelandic politics and nothing else. Such an outlook easily becomes a feedback loop, endlessly reproducing itself, the world on end.
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Are you a terrorist photographer or just an anti-social one?
The Guardian(.co.uk) has been collecting stories about police applying some shady sort of license they have in the UK to stop and search, even arrest, street photographers, professionals and amateurs, sometimes for suspected terrorist activities, sometimes for ‘anti-social’ behavior. The cases are interesting in a wider context, as police and legal trends set in one European country tend to spread, and particularly for the photographers and filmmakers everywhere alike, as such a tendency would be set to seriously damage the potential of documentary work.
In the cases of the published stories, some of the photographers have videorecorded the process of their harrassment and/or subsequent arrest – making these cases doubly interesting for anyone concerned with cinema as a truth-producing tool to challenge authority.
In the links below, the videos are included with the articles.
London, dec. 11, 2009.
Accrington February 21, 2010.
On January 23, 2000 photographers gathered for protest against these practices, in Trafalgar Square, London.
The UK terrorism law, also known as section 44, has been applied in peculiar ways, even more promiscuously than many of those imagined, who were concerned about the road ahead when Western countries responded to the attack on the twin towers, in 2001, with various legislation increasing state authorities’ powers to track and interfere in people’s daily lives. In 2008, 2300 children stopped by British officers in the name of terrorism law, thereof 58 under the age of ten.
As many photographers and filmmakers will know, photography tends to be forbidden and/or strictly controlled in those places defined as pseudo-public or post-public – i.e. shopping malls and private commercial areas, that often have the aura of being public space, but in which behavior can be restricted and controlled far more extensively than civil rights would allow in real public spaces, such as on the street or in a public square. The right to take pictures as seen as part of the ongoing struggle about public space.
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Right until after Iceland joined the EEC in 1993, halfway into the EU, every municipality had a sheriff, with a rather extensive role, as law-enforcing police officer, prosecutor and judge in many matters. I remember an instance when my father, an avid amateur photographer, took up his camera in a small town where we had just moved to, to take pictures of sheep that had just been slaughtered and lay hung on some sort of wooden suspense, blood dripping – all quite picturesque – when a hand suddenly arrived in the frame, forbidding the photography altogether. It turned out to be the local sheriff, doing his own illegal home-slaughtering, and conveniently enforcing local restrictions on photography on site. Mostly though, as far as I know, photographers have probably been rather free to do their thing in Iceland, that is, except in the shopping malls, of course. There’s no freedom like free markets.
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Good Copy Bad Copy
Good Copy Bad Copy, a fantastic Danish 2007 documentary about the battle going on against the tyranny of copyright, can be found here. Highly informative, covering everything from the Swedish Pirate Party whose members have been elected for the European Parliament, to filmmaking and distribution in Nigeria.
When Nigerian films were featured in a special section at the Berlinale film festival in 2004, I wrote about the lessons that might be learned from their methods, in a small art economy such as Iceland’s. That short article is here, alas, in Icelandic.
The clip above focuses on innovative methods of music production and distribution in Brazil. Notice the nice juxtaposition of images from the technoclubs first, all glitz, and then the facilities of the music producer, very sans glitz. As the film is distributed non-commercially, under a creative commons license, I’m curious if the filmmakers actually travelled this much, or if they had contact with separate teams in separate continents – the film’s aesthetics seem too coherent throughout for that, though.
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Epic ös
Eiríkur Örn Norddahls’ Höpöhöpö Böks has been chosen for the Berlin Zebra Poetry Film Festival. Epic nonsense of a supreme quality: