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> To: [log in to unmask]
> From: david d'heilly <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: feelbad movies
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> > there are
> > several films I can think of which are notorious for the
> > feel bad factor. Nil By Mouth, Ladybird Ladybird, Scum.
>
Sorry John Bleasdale, I don't know the other films that you refer to, but I
can not support your thesis that "Nil By Mouth" belongs in the feelbad
movie genre. Firstly, it is a film which offers hope above all things.
Obviously, all films which do not subscribe to happy solutions are not, by
definition, "feelbad" cinema, any more than documentaries which do not
attempt to provide soothing solutions are not "feelbad" documentaries.
Feelbad cinema is an attempt to isolate an aesthetic territory of avant
gardism in the face of a middle class which is more capable of consuming
than than it's creators are capable of creating for. It is a classical
avant garde trauma. Its creators are middle class "fuck-ups." It is nothing
if not reactionary. It is a cinema of boredom, of middle class suburbanism,
and is a valid vein of research for those who produce from this position.
Trust fund anarchist kind of stuff. They have their own issues. The thing
which is important to understand here, however, is that it is a cinema of
aesthetics. Nil By Mouth, on the otherhand, is an expression derived from
its manner of production, of dramatic predicaments which at no moment take
simple solutions, and yet still manage to find resolution in humanism. In
this it is surprisingly modernist. Stage improvisation bound to linearality
by the fact of being documented. It has no relation to the thesis that
feelbad films attempt to exploit. "Feelbads" revel in being a bummer from
the start, and this decadence is their "payoff." They have no coherent
production methodology. Nil by Mouth does. I think that we should be clear
about this.
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