Hi Rebecca
I meant to put this bit in my previous mail:
>Congrats, Edmund, on your article in Jacket, on the
other side of the antipodean divide, and it was
interesting.
Thanks!
>Well, this is still unclear to me,
It's unclear to me too, I was blurring the term politics to mean relations
of movement, energy, power in any sense, but it's not a v. useful blurring
really!
>for instance, if
>someone says to me 'maybe you should take an aspirin"
>because I've said I have a headache, does that make
>his or her saying so, political?
Interesting example, because we'd probably say that the someone is just
being helpful, but if the details are slightly changed - the word "maybe" is
striked, or it's said in an aggressive tone, or if you were depressed over
days and days in a way which sometimes manifested as headaches, but the
someone just kept saying 'maybe you should take an aspirin'...
It makes me think of one of the truly shocking moments in Hitch's output,
near the beginning of The Man Who Knew Too Much (2nd version) where Dr
Mckenna forces his wife (it's Doris Day!) to take a handful of pills
_before_ he tells her that their son has gone missing. He pins her down to
force her too, for her own good we're meant to understand, because, for this
affluent American 50s mother, the impending psychic disaster will be too
much, a very bourgeois '50s moment which is not really meant to be shocking
to the audience, & that's what's shocking now, though Hitch is nodding a wry
commentary on middle-class values to the hipsters at the back.
>I am somewhat unclear as to why
>you associate activitities like 'critiquing and
>delineating' with politics, and not propaganda, since
>the critique of propaganda has if anything extended
>the critique of politics.
I don't particularly, & agree that the critique of Politics with a capital P
is extended by the critique of propaganda & the workings of metaphor in
public space etc, it was just that pornography isn't Political in this way.
>I had to go and look up Tinto Brass, who is I guess,
>the Italian filmmaker? pornographer, if you prefer,
>since I'm not familiar with his work or marketing and
>can't say.
he _is_ a pornographer, he's a long way from a film-maker interested in sex,
like Catherine Breillat or Nagisa Oshima or someone.
>since there
>is the question evoked in the implied 'witness' the
>one who snips the quotes out of the archive of power
>and why and what the relationship is?
it is in one way indefensible, irresponsible, though a documentary maker
using archive footage might be less agonised, just because it's more
commonly seen. I do think, The one who snips, the one who (we are always
aware) is directing our gaze, does ensure in that way that their presence is
not forgotten, that they are _in_ the text, seen there & not hovering above
it & feigning an (impossible) outside-objective position. But then again...
Edmund
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