Manifestation
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Revision as of 22:35, 17 November 2008
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Joris Ivens @110
Joris Ivens (1898–1989) was a Dutch documentary filmmaker and devout communist. He is generally respected as one of the foremost documentarists of the twentieth century, noted for his political film Misère au Borinage, which I had the pleasure of screening in class last year.
Borinage is noteworthy in media theory because it proves the inherent ficticiousness of the documentary film.
Like most documentaries, it mixes reality and fiction, and in this case, contrary to authorial intention. For the film, the two directors had arranged a manifestation with extras from the Borinage. The miners were to walk behind a portrait of Karl Marx. The police mistook it for a real manifestation, they intervened and the "protest" was dispersed. This was filmed by Ivens and Storck.
It would cause Walter Benjamin to write in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:
- "Similarly, the newsreel offers everyone the opportunity to rise from passer-by to movie extra. In this way any man might even find himself part of a work of art, as witness Vertov's Three Songs About Lenin or Ivens Borinage."
Fortelling Andy Warhol's famous 15 minutes dictum, Benjamin added that "Any man today can lay claim to being filmed."
If Borinage is a Blakean dystopian "and did these feet" anti-industrialization document, Ivens also made Rain, a much more impressionist affair, generally considered a "city symphony," a loosely outlined genre typified by Manhatta (1921) and Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, (1927).
It is two years ago today since I first[1] spent time on the concept of hauntology. Originally a French language pun on the homophonic concept ontology, it is now a musical category in nascent state closest in kinship to dubstep, championed most prominently by British author K-Punk.
Hauntology Now! was a symposium held May 12, 2008 in the United Kingdom featuring K-Punk and Kode9.
Since then Australian philosopher Gary Sauer-Thompson has written quite frequently about it, I've written about that here:Gary Sauer-Thompson on hauntology.
Two days ago I added the Burial Mixes to the concept on semantic and aesthetic grounds. If you don't like the news go out and make some of your own.
