fake-start

i could start like: recent hollywood and also european films are more and more focussed on >life<. life in an explicit, blunt form, or: in its biological form. >21 grams< is a new film of alejandro gonzales inarritu . 21 grams is a highly dramatic film not around love, but around >life<: a young mother + wife, christina (naomi watts) looses her husband + her two little daughters in a car-accident. a religious weirdo + ex-junkie (jack – benicio del toro) runs them over with his van. paul a professor of mathematics with a heavy hearth-defect (paul – sean penn) is meanwhile waiting for a hearthtransplantation and finally profits from the tragedy + receives the late husbands hearth. in the aftermath of the operation he becomes curious whose hearth he has received + tries to find the dead guys wife, falls in love with her... as biological-existential as it can get. and finally when the new-hearted guy falls back in hearthproblems, since the transplantation turns out to be a failure on the longer run, he muses, while dying, about these 21 grams, which is the exact amount of weight that vanishes immediately when man becomes corpse -- what, is he asking, is the consistency of this decrease, what is included in this slice of anti-materiality.

i could also refer to films like >speak with me< (pedro almodovar) or >my life without me< of isabel coixet (2003 – produced by almodovar), where a mother hides her knowledge, that she is going to die from an incurable disease + decides that she is going to take advantage of her last remaining months, live actively everything that she was missing in her life before, f.e. a new love-affair. but at the same time she is organizing her familys future life after her death. i could also refer to the so called postmortal films (american beauty (1999, sam mendes), sixth sense(1999, m.night shyamalan), the others (alejandro amenabar) etc.). this increase in life-related films could indicate, that there is a tendency in society, or: a dispositif on which these films might be an answer. these films could indicate that foucault + some followers are right in saying that life in its pure biological form as well as in its >creative< qualified form is the new basis of power + the law + -- on the other hand – the basis of economical success.

doubts on automated indication

but does this >sentiment< of a correlation between these films + society has a meaning, how does film relate to its spectators, or: how does reception take place? do we know that the traits of a film are symptoms of anything else but themselves? who grants that so called symptoms are not merely inner-systemic effects, that assume relevance. david bordwell, the antagonist of all big theoretical fantasy in filmanalysis tears apart regis debrays big narration of >life + death of the image. a history of the gaze in occident< and quotes:>this book<, writes debray on hin book, >has as an object the invisible codes of the visible, which unquestionable for each time define a state of the world, i.e. a culture. or how does the world is seen by those who are not aware of it.< cinema is central for debray, for different reasons, but also because >each new technique creates a new subject, in renewing its object. the photography has changed our perception of space und cinema our perception of time (through montage...).<

it can be discussed why bordwell has chosen debray to attack, since debray is not specifically canonical. but maybe debray is suitable for a general approach, since he just speaks out what is general knowledge in a cultural studied world, in which we know, that representation means something. bordwell makes fun of debrays neo-hegelianism in dividing history in >epoches of gaze< from magical idol, to illusionists repräsentation to, nowadays, simulation. but why is it that debray is so blind and ignores, that only his own big narration is supposedly free from the postmodern verdict, that all big narration is stupid. (vgl. postmoderne-diskussion bordwell, s34)

but lets check: television, isn’t this a radical change in the mode of perception, doesn’t tv mean that perception is fast, multi-layered, fragmented, hallucinating? shakespeares sister or brother, wouldn’t they think they’d be postmortal, when being catapulted before a tv set? for them, that must be heaven – or hell. but on the other hand: why do shakespeares theatre pieces still happen to seem to be comlex, multi-layered, ambigious, fast?

the ratio film + relevance is not automatically given, not even the ratio between success + relevance. this ratio is – in postsociological times – object of a research which has to be developed.

this touches profoundly the question if film can be theorized or not. when f.e. jean amery, the philosopher + self-declared film-amateur was making jokes already in the 60ies about hitchcock as >metaphysician of fear<, (what would he have said to zizeks >what you ever wanted to know about lacen and didn’t dare to ask hitchcock<) hitchcock himself might have agreed as he underlines the naivité of the medium film. but on the other hand, when he affirms to truffaut:>but to shrink + widen time, isn’t that the task of every director? don’t you agree that the time in film should never have anything to do with time in real life?< (s.61), for having read maurizio lazzaratos videophilosophy there is no chance not to hear resonate his theories, which develop a theory on film + video-images starting by bergson through deleuze and which are based on the moving images’ ability to shrink and widen time.

how functions film-theory in general? if we follow thomas elaessers + warren bucklands general account >studying contemporary american film< (london 2002) we will find the whole array of film-theory-schools, he is introducing, very inspiring, but also heavy involved in weltanschauung. whom to follow + why. do we believe in materialist theory or are we just make use of postmarxism., or, if we go with feminism – since mere life-experience made us aware that feminism is still a tool for opposing gender-inequalities – do we then also take psychoanalysis for granted, which teaches that the symbolic realm exists. + it is this realms existence that makes feminism argue, that there is something wrong (or phallocentric) about the symbolic or the symbolic order when its always a guy, who embodies the agency of narration. i go along that films are phallocentric in the sense that women are still rather used to be looked at + that there might be a queen as head of a country in a romantic film on the medieval ages, but robin hood is a guy. i am taken from an analysis showing >die hard< (1988, john mc tiernan with bruce willis) as a film about male crisis. elsaesser + buckland think the film is hollywoods attempt to solve that crisis. their analysis bases on the traditional opposition between the male as agency + the female as either caring or object to be caught. the acknowledgement of male crisis forces hollywood to translated the male body into a body-object that gets beaten, and that is vulnerable, but still can emanate from there to the sole agency to solve the diegetic crisis: he stops the terrorists from highjacking the whole skyscraer-building, and by doing so he convinces his wife, who had left home to be profession-wise successful, to come back, on a christmas eve, but not for a day, but for ever) .

elsaesser + buckland understand the film as a postclassical film + use semiotics + psychoanalysis. david bordwell is introduced as an antagonist in theoriy, since he resists to a need in opening up a new category. he also analyzed >die hard<, but his analysis is easier, simpler, less >insight< or less playful? anyhow, elsaessers + bucklands analysis is way more fun, more interesting. + that would be exactly their argument: take for your analytical project whatever is effective. but what is this, is this philosophy of pragmatics, deleuze-guattaris idea of philosophy of the tool-box, or deconstructionist theory? but all of these do have strong assets of weltanschauung. deconstructionist theory is in elsaessers/bucklands account one possibilty among others. if no analysis can ever match with what it analyses, then we do have to start playing, starting no matter where in the >text< (as deconstructionists understand the matter of film as >text<) + every result is a new production. but this is not merely pragmatic, this is a deep commitment to a philosophy of the non-existence of simple pragmatics, since the objects of the world (and the certainties) are not given, but constructed.

it demonstrates the extent in which heavy philosophy is on the start with much of current film-theory. and lacanian theory, as popularized through philosophers like slavoj zizek involve us in being ready to think that film is what it is because it resembles our deepest structures of self-constitution through reflexion + mirror-stage. this is strong + thats also why it is so fascinating. and why not, something got to make it that we exist, but is film really involved?

do we derive film-theory from film or film-theory from theory? or from political positions?

let’s do it as a project, i.e. as heuristics: we take films like 21 grams f.e., we suppose that >life< might have a more crucial role in films in general. as we acknowledge a full arbitrariness in our approach.

and: there is a political and theoretical stake around the notion of biopolitics.

biopolitics

biopolitics is – right now – not a distinct theory, but an ongoing debate. biopolitics as theory is the attempt to draw conclusions out of a change in the political economy. first of all : work. work-time is not an opposite-term to leasure-time, the whole life has become a fabric/production plant. there is a strong need for creativity, incitement, activity in the industrial nations as well on the side of production as on the side of consumtion. fashion, music-industries, computer-utilities, internet are its main examples. the distinction between production (fabric) + reproduction (home – recreation, sexuality, psychic consolation, health system) is invalid now. affection, stimulation, feelings, affects are parameters of what makes a production profitable. this aspect is discussed by negri/hardt, but can also be found by andré gorz or linda singer, not to mention all the postoperaist comrades like paolo virno or maurizio lazzarato.

foucault bridges this aspect with the other perspective, opened up by giorgio agamben. foucault brought up the idea, that sexuality is nothing that is repressed, but something that gets incited through power. we do have to have sex, we do have to talk about it, we do have to be active, we do have to be productive.

his notion of biopower means a change in power-functioning: the souvereign used to be able to decide over live or death, i.e. he could legitimately kill his subjects. now he (or it) makes the subjects live + it is not able to kill them – generally spealing. power incites their activity. deleuzes little text on the society of control enforces this point.

although agamben makes a different use of it, his idea is foreshadowed by foucault. what links the subject (the subjected servant) to the souvereign was the souvereign’s power to kill the subject. and that -- as an example -- makes the guillotine a necessary spectacle in the french revolution, it make the new souvereign (the people) identifiable + renews the link between subject + souvereign. but since this souvereign is based on the people in its most general (maybe biological) form, they are introduced into the political realm. population becomes political.

agambens takes up the link between souvereign + the life/death option. first of all: he is not so sure about what means modernity (i.e. the shift between the power to kill or to let live as in foucaults definition). he rather discusses continuations. for him, the power of the souvereign resides in his ability to bring up the distinction between bare life + qualified life.

agamben distinguishes between life that is concerned about its way of life (i.e., although agamben doesn’t say so, the subject of the bourgeois society, the individual of the liberal market, the subject of psychoanalysis, etc.) + a state devoid of all these properties + options, i.e. as a biological form of (sur)viving, that is only concerned about its bare existence.

the distinction takes place in the ausnahmezustand (state of exception/state of siege). + every body/subject is possibly subjected to that distinction. NY after 11/9 demonstrated, how everybody had to eventually give up civil rights under the administrational necessities of control + detention.

two remarks: 1. the transformation from qualified life (life which is defined through its form of life, i.e. ambitions, professions, character qualities, etc.) into bare life, happens not only when the souvereign puts the individual in custody, in concentration camps, camps of detention, camps of expulsion or to guantamo bay, but also as an effect of serious desease. the automobile f.e. is the very vehicle inside the civil society to include the option of bare life. and this is an exemple for the general inclusion of what is excluded in civil society.

agamben believes that souvereign power cannot constitute itself but through the production of bare life. this functions to the extent that this power is based on the people in its biological form + on nothing else + that is the case from the french revolution on. this might render some of the erratic behaviour of the new world order explainable. power needs bare life to the extent of its totalitarian character. nazi-germany being the peak of totalitarism (and agamben pursues the hypothesis, that the reason of nazis fervor in isolating + killing jews might not be found in their racism as such, but in the need for >bare life<.

is film a bio-product?

the production of subjectivity

first of all: film is a biopolitical endeauvour insofar as it fulfills paradigmatically the categories of the new economy. it connects, creates + communicates affects. it uses affects as source, + material. but also it makes use of a persons’ totality. and that on all levels. christian petzold, one of the few heirs of deutsche filmemacher, said that he would love to direct films in a john ford-manner, the studio as fabric, the director as white-collar-worker, but that he is forced to act as an artist. which means that he has to produce some kind of subjectivity to accompany his films, to sell them, to make them possible.

the production of subjectivity is one of the major tropes in biopolitical discussions.

the trope of production of subjectivity inverts the liberalistic ideology, which supposes that the individuals are already in place when the market enters + which offers all the individuals a place, work, options to dwell in. production of subjectivity supposes a close interlinking between commodity exchange, work, market + subjectivity. we had to be >produced< in a certain way, to function as disciplinary workers, husbands + wifes who need refrigeratos, or, today, we need to be >produced< as young adults of endless-summer, who buy adequate clothes, who are junkies to develop computer-industries + new forms of making use of it.

and the industries of visual culture are deeply involved. but this aspect of film has been the case for a long time + used to be discussed as films’ ideological impact, not only as wrong ideas, but as constitution of subjectivity (interpellation). a biopolitical theory reveals at this point nothing about film, it reveals only the new position of film in the industrial-context. which is interesting enough and has a retro-impact on film.

rainer werner fassbinder is an interesting and paradigmatical example of what petzold would love to get rid of. a fassbinder film is an easily recognizable object, his style, his signature, but a fassbinder film is also connected with an >image< of what fassbinder + his entourage represent. maybe: a subjectivity, supposedly authentic or faked: it is proletarian, aggressive, unjust, sentimental, clear-cut, melancholic, sexual explicit, sometimes surprisingly gender-constructed, equalistic to all sorts of sexual-practices.

how has this subjectivity been produced? and: produced AS film. this kind of subjectivity needs a commodity, an object, which retroactively produces what is its origin. in fassbinders case this product was a cultural artifice, initially theatre productions, then films. these objects >express< a modus operandi which can be received through an audience as subjectivity in a strong sense, but cannot be ignored by any audience, it is been received as such at least in a weak sense.

no film starts nowhere + no reception starts nowhere. of course in a given audience, they might be totally ignorant to where a film comes from, but this is rarely what the filmproduction was about..

my proposition to test a link between biopolitical discussions and film is the following: there is a double exposure of the diegetic film + an estimation of its production-assets. these production assets can be very divers, on the side of the production as well as on the side of the audience. george lucas star wars, f.e., meant infantile naivité combined with state of the arts visual technology. my argument would be, that you wouldn’t just watch a fantasy-world of some kind + perceive the technological way of the mise-en-scene as a neutral way of staging the story. the state of the arts-production is part of the film + part of its fun. otherwise it would only be children’s stuff.

the most important resort for the studio-systems is its star-system. the production of the stars extra-diegetic persona is part of filmproduction in the us as in europe from the beginning on. there is a whole connex of widespread vague knowledge about the stars’ earlier films, their lovelife + the television in general which form this constitutive ambivalence of the film, but ambivalence less contentwise, but status-like, production-wise, or: the double-exposure, the integration of production in the product.

the new dvd-culture makes extensive use of making of’s, star-portraits, press-tours, etc.

the stipulation of preknowledge, simulated through tv -- which i wouldn’t so easily call a biopolitical one, but there is a name to be found for this double-exposure as part of the project here in maastricht.

the double exposure is easier to detect for european films, since the possibilities of its production circumstances are quite divers. it is interesting enough that in filmbusiness the film d’auteur, der filmemacher seemed the most hated thing in the late 70s/early 80s when capitalism regained its global aesthetics (+ new hollywood turned back to its commercial roots), but today it has not only survived (in disguise) but is even forced (how petzold stated) + the connection between directing + book/scenario is still in vigor. take f.e. almodovar, lars von trier, david lynch, to name only some of the best known.

but the extra-diegetic, the double-exposure, consists of different things. it is a strange kind of realism of a new kind. it brings together + separates in one step the diegetic construction of >life< + the extra-diegetiv supposedly non-construction of life. this convergence seems to me the >machine< that film is about. we will see something of this in films who stage their/a production like fassbinders >beware of the holy whore<. but while this demonstrates the connex of biopolitical production + film in the sense of production of subjectivity, it does not yet open to a discussion on agambens notion of bare life. it does not give the full picture. i guess it can only be given through the introduction of at least 2 other elements, i.e. sex + violence. the automobile at the end of the following scenes from >open your eyes< + >vanilla sky< are a first indication.

vanilla sky + open your eyes

i would like to propose a kind of mental installation. two films (two extracts), which ressemble each other extremely (same scenario), but different modi of production, different types of acting, different sharpness in character-construction, one european, one studio-systematic.

one is >open your eyes< (alejandro amenabar, 1997), a spanish production, the other is >vanilla sky< (cameron crowe, 2001), produced by tom cruise.

+ the thesis: the way (technique/method) of casting a glance on peoples (assumed) life/their time/their daily routines (life capture) reveals an organisation, and the two films will show that the difference is not one of european versus us-american, but between the levels of industrialization.

the main character cesar, eduardo noriega, later tom cruise-- enters the flat of a woman, whom he has just met. he is extremely rich, she rather poor. he observes the traces of her life, her gewohnheiten, insofar as they materialize as furniture or order of things. he watches the wall of photos, shots of her leasure time, holidays, family, the register of an normal, poor life (which is therefor rich). he likes that. it becomes an object, for him.

later in the film this first encounter becomes very important + extremely refined. all what seems clumsy in this scene, sentimental, stereotyed, banal, kitsch, turns out to be >real<, the jokes are bad, etc. -- while other scenes will later portray happiness >better done< as fiction.

after this first night the complexity comes back, the ambivalence of what is right + what is not. life marked as contradiction, as ambivalence. the peak of the contradiction under the surface of commodification is something that hollywood can do bitingly + more refined.