Hi Edmund,

> 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'...
> 

yes, exactly, that's why I said that perhaps you were
right and it is political, for remembering
actualities, to which one doesn't have to go to the
movies, all the times in which one's  reactions are
viewed as 'an impending psychic disaster' and
remediated, one way of diagnosis and treatment or
another, from herbal drops to shrinks to shock
therapies, etc. . . and how someone who's used to this
can do it to herself, etc, and the 'tone' well, that
depends too, I'd guess, on how often one has been
treated within such a framework, a less troublesome
awareness than one's own remediations of others, but I
don't know, the more I think about this, the more
unravels, I'm sure I've been mistaken, about any
number of things. 

And, yes, that's very good that you're in Jacket, you
have a lot of boing! energy, so I'm sure that this
success will be followed by many others,

best,

Rebecca
--- Edmund Hardy <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 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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