All at sea: Film Socialisme

When asked in a recent interview about the scene where Alain Badiou gives a lecture on geometry and philosophy to an empty auditorium on a cruise ship adrift in the Mediterranean, Jean-Luc Godard explained that he announced the lecture on the ship’s activities calendar but, sadly, nobody came. I hope there’s a better turnout when Film Socialisme screens next weekend at Edmonton's Metro Cinema, but I can almost guarantee that any prospective viewer, regardless of their facility with either philosophy or geometry, would surely have had an easier time grasping the thesis of Badiou’s lecture than that of Godard’s latest bricolage. Abrasive and staccato, fragmented in image, music and language, its multilingual dialogues obscured by Godard’s choice to offer only partial subtitles, riddled with references to politics and art yet withholding of context or commentary, this tripartite Film seems founded on the conviction that the medium itself is corrupted by signifiers that collectively fail to provide meaning. Call it Babel at 24 frames per second. Except that, for the first time in Godard’s oeuvre, it’s all video.

‘Des choses comme ça,’ the first of Film Socialisme’s three sections, struck me in my single viewing as the most coherent. Perhaps because the cruise ship seems to lend itself most easily to persuasive metaphors. A sampling of global citizens, among them a Russian detective, a hunter of war criminals, a Jewish banker, an elderly man accompanied by a young woman, and Patti Smith, found busking in the lobby, are on board, sharing a confined, landless, mobile space constructed for leisure, inaccessible to the underprivileged, offering magnificent views (Godard’s images of pure sea, sometimes almost black, are breathtaking), and containing the possibility of large scale disaster. Crowds gyrate to crushing music in the ship’s apocalyptic discotheque, captured crudely enough to seem almost abstract on what would appear to be a cell phone camera. Models stroll the decks. (There are hot young babes—a Godard staple.) Europe is “humiliated by liberty.” Everything feels vaguely ominous. Or rather ominously vague.

‘Notre Europe’ unfolds on land, amidst a family, their gas station, their llama and his donkey. It irked me to see them let the water gush at full blast while casually brushing their teeth or scrubbing a dish, but otherwise they seem decent enough folks, and there are genuinely endearing moments shared by mother and son. A TV crew arrives. I’m not at all sure they get the coverage they need. ‘Nos humanités’ promises a return to the cruise ship but proves the densest, least grounded section, a travelogue montage of war and atrocity, with visits to Palestine, Egypt, Naples, Hellas, Barcelona, and Odessa, where a re-mix of the most famous moments in Battleship Potemkin forms just one of countless flamboyant appropriations lining Film Socialisme. (Herein lies the title, perhaps: a property-dissolving collective creation, though helmed by a cinematic legend and rigorous anti-populist.) There are quotes from Shakespeare, Balzac, and Derrida, a French cover of ‘Flashdance… What a Feeling,’ and pieces of Cheyenne Autumn, if I’m not mistaken—and I could be, about many things here. My memory’s at sea. I’d need to see Film Socialisme several times to say more. But there are so many Godards to revisit, and several from the middle period especially that I still have yet to see. It might take a while to get round to this one again.

Film Socialisme screens at Metro Cinema from March 18 - 20.

David Shields tries to make it real... but compared to what? Plus: Lermontov!

David Shields

I think I've underlined more passages in my copy of David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, $28.95) than any other book I own. This initially struck me as inherently impressive, until I noticed how many of these passages seemed familiar, those stray lines that echo Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, or W.G. Sebald, or the paragraph of dictums taken directly from another manifesto, that of the Dogme 95 movement. I make a habit of learning as little about a book before reading it as possible, so forgive me for being slow on the uptake. Though it’s no secret, I didn’t clue into the fact that not only does Shields include un-attributed quotations in Reality Hunger but that such quotes, sometimes altered by Shields, constitute the bulk of the book, which is about a lot of things—far too many things, in fact, to be a coherent manifesto—but is perhaps above all, or at its best, a defense of collage and appropriation as a fecund and arguably unavoidable MO for artists. (Shields’ sources are listed in the back of the book, though he urges us to rip those pages out and ignore their content in the spirit of… well, we’ll get to that. The problem with this isn’t that readers are such sticklers for copyright law but that we, you know, like to read, and might want to find out who wrote something especially juicy so as to follow our interests.)

Andy Kaufman: master of reality

Reality Hunger contains 618 texts, written or selected by Shields, designed to collectively argue our living in a period in which, to paraphrase Michael Moore’s Oscar acceptance speech, quoted by Shields, we hunger for reality because our daily lives are so inundated with fiction, ie: politics, advertising, junk journalism. We crave art and entertainment that responds to and interacts with the real. We embrace whatever promises to deliver it: memoirs, sample-heavy hip-hop, YouTube karaoke, reality TV. Yet Shields assures us, quite rightly, that reality, or at least randomness, has been infiltrating the artifices of art for millennia—even the Bible is a work of assemblage. Something Shields doesn’t explain is how exactly one is supposed to find their dose of unfiltered reality through programs that are painstakingly designed works of wish fulfillment, soap opera by another name. Shields is anti-narrative, but reality TV appeals to viewers precisely because of its resilience of classical narrative. Despite his inclusion of a tired reexamination of the James Frey controversy and a For Dummies history of DJ culture, Shields is obviously a smart, immensely curious guy with an impeccable radar for cultural shifts, and Reality Hunger is a fun, oddly breezy, engrossing read. But while the argument being built here—an extension of Jonathan Lethem’s landmark essay ‘The Ecstasy of Influence,’ published in Harper’s in 2007—is fascinating, it’s also a mess. Nearly everything intrigues, yet little holds up to close scrutiny.

Lil Wayne: keeping it real?

Manifestos require monsters to rally against, preferably ones long embedded in the establishment. Shields’ main monster, after copyright law, is the novel, and his criticisms of it yield this book’s most overpowering wafts of horseshit. He champions personal essayists over novelists because they “keep looking at their own lives from different angles.” Yet dozens of the authors whose work Shields upholds as helping to sate our reality hunger write books we still call novels—the list includes Proust, Joyce, and Beckett—while there’s surely no limit to the number of personal essays out there that are both crap literature and complete failures at critical self-examination. Uninterested in the fiction part of fiction, Shields wants to do away with reading “700 pages” of story—an exaggeration, since few contemporary novels are even half that length—and just get to the point already. But what is the point of a novel, and can it be distilled without losing its resonance? What exactly is a novel anyway? What’s a memoir? And what the hell is “reality” supposed to be? Is there really more of it in The Bachelor than in Moby Dick? Is Lil Wayne more in touch with it than Gabriel García Márquez? For the record, Shields, directly or indirectly, asks similar questions. The mystery is how can he ask them and still arrive at some of the half-baked conclusions he posits. It doesn’t sound as provocative, but in many respects Reality Hunger is basically a fresh plea to continue applying rigour to the postmodern project, especially if we boil postmodernism down to staying alert to form and accident and a willingness to negotiate the fourth wall. This is no small achievement.

Lermontov: before moustache

Shields asks: “Is there a sense in which a writer’s vision gets more thoroughly and beautifully tested in a book of linked stories than it does in a collection of miscellaneous stories or in a novel? …I’m thinking of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son.” (You’ll note that two of Shields’ examples were called novels by their authors.) Anyway, I like this question very much and, having already read and enjoyed two of these titles I decided to read the third. I bought a dog-eared copy of A Hero of Our Time years ago, my knowledge of Lermontov limited to the facts surrounding his untimely death and references to him made by Solyony in Three Sisters. Plus, I liked his moustache.

Lermontov: with moustache

The hero in question is Pechorin, an officer and a pretty nasty piece of work: romantic, manipulative, charismatic, cynical, unable to empathize with others, exhausted by life’s disappointments: “One just goes on living out of curiosity, waiting for something new. It’s absurd and annoying.” How emblematic Pechorin is of mid-19th century Russian society I’m unsure, but regarding Shields’ question about linked stories, A Hero of Our Time does seem to reach its heights of character development and social critique through the deployment of varied anecdotes and genres. We learn about Pechorin through stories told by a man who once knew him, by a fleeting encounter with a writer, by news of his fate, and by his (edited) journals, which describe a love affair, a duel, and, in the book’s chilling final chapter, an evening spent debating determinism and death with a man about to die. Once you’ve read this slim but rich novel it becomes impossible to imagine how this character in all his complexities could be conveyed without Lermontov’s pattern of hearsay, memory, and private rumination, of external and internal portraiture. So all credit to Shields for, however it might contradict his thesis, pointing out the links between literary works of 1992, 1979, and 1840, and for getting me to finally read a masterpiece that’s been sitting on my shelf since about 1994.