Cavedwellers

The subject is a trashcan wherin is “deposited” (Metz 824) all the refuse of the spectacle so why don’t you just go out jogging already that stuff rots your brain? Like that, we’re back to the Cartesian subject, the disembodied eye floating about, receiving causal chains of light waves. Watching a film is a thinking exercise that requires no thought. We are all mystic writing pads waiting to be impressed upon so that the little homunculus inside our head (ghost in the machine) can read our palimpsest grocery list of a life.

So, I may as well show my hand here—I am coming to these authors from the perspective of what’s now called German Media Theory aka Media Archaeology. A generalization: Cultural Studies/English/Semiotics studies the content while GMT studies the machine. This is also the kindof stuff I’m looking at in my MA thesis, for example how does the Polaroid shape an individual’s memory as compared to a jpeg? So, what I’m getting at is that there is something which I can pull away from this week’s authors so long as one teases out or translates all of the Freud and Lacan. Of course, that’s a problem, because for our authors Freud and Lacan are pretty smart guys. One possible starting point—Baudry: “Do the instruments (the technical base) produce specific ideological effects? (356)

We get to the meat of Baudry in the following two quotes: “The meaning effect produced does not depend only on the content of the images but also of the material” (359); and: “Ultimately, the forms of narrative adopted, the “contents” of the image, are of little importance so long as identification remains possible” (364). Which latter quote brings forth two issues: (1) content doesn’t matter (we are an empty container, swallowing whole all films equally), and (2) when does identification not remain possible? That is, when are we not identifying with a film? And is that lack of identification through choice (Our choice? The director’s?) or is it just an arbitrary happening, something remaining on the level of the unconscious?

I'm not sure about mapping Brecht onto cinema and asking, Where can we find auteurs that are following in Brecht's tradition? Because in some sense that question becomes a reduction which ends in making of Brecht a criterion. But, having said all that, I like the films of Fassbinder and think he has the whole Verfremdungseffekt going on.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant