Bread & Ink

Thanks to the many dollars the UW is able to devote to undergrad research, I spent my summer working on an independent video project over the summer. Here's my speech and the video, oh boy oh boy.
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My name is Claire Fox and I’m from the Comparative History of Ideas and Comparative Literature programs. I’ve been in both departments for nearly a year now, so I’m pretty firmly rooted in the humanities and cultural studies. About this time last year, I was studying print journalism pretty seriously, but I was in the process of completing an intensive media studies and social change program in Portland that featured a strong video component. When working with video, I realized that there were a lot of artistic opportunities in journalism that I had yet to explore.

With that in mind, I’ve spent the past year caught between mediums; still working on my writing, but keeping an eye on other forms of artistic communication. So, since I’ve entered this Summer Institute, I’ve been trying to create a visual language that parallels the ideas I’m already articulating rooted in linguistic or theoretical traditions.

The name of this research project is “Amplified Present: The Delayed Beauty of a Bizarre Locale.” Toward the end of this presentation, I’ll show a video I made which was inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s short story, “Signs and Symbols.” This is my attempt at visual language-making.

“Signs and Symbols” essentially traces the relationship between an elderly Russian immigrant couple and their incurably deranged son on his birthday when the couple visits him in the sanatorium. I initially was attracted to this story because of the son’s condition, which in the story is termed “referential mania.” This condition is an acute form of paranoia where the son thinks that all inanimate objects and all of phenomenal nature are constantly engaged in a malicious commentary on his life. This sort of psychological condition seemed like an excellent set of images to unpack in video.

In video, I can approach the narrative through a phenomenological lens, by picking out individual gestures, moments, or objects in nature from Nabokov’s writing and meditating on those images to communicate a story instead of using traditional chronological narrative structure. This allows me to look at the interaction between phenomenal nature and artifacts on one hand with perception, imagination, and memory on the other, this all done without having to deal with words as a barrier, or even having to depend on them by default as an anchor.

In addition to my fascination with referential mania, there was one particular image in “Signs and Symbols” that held my attention. The structure of this story is shaped around the elderly couple’s routines, all which have complementary sets of gestures or sounds embedding them into our sensory memories. At one point in the story, however, the husband makes a sudden, incisive decision that launches the couple out of their routines into unknown lifestyle territory.

What was even more fascinating to me, though, was what happened immediately after this decision was made. As Nabokov writes, “They sat down to their unexpected festive midnight tea.” On my first read of this story, this sentence was unremarkable. It was only when I continued to re-read the story that the image of the “unexpected festive midnight tea” became a familiar space where two characters create a bizarre locale in the weary familiar. The space was also very present: the husband severed the couple from their past, but they hadn’t yet taken any steps to organize the future. This was another instance of perception worth addressing.

Yet again, video seemed like the prime medium for image interpretation. In addition to its ability to pull apart and meditate upon images, video allows the ability to choose one primary image as a plateau and have a structure that lends complementary images the importance of that primary image. That in mind, when I started planning this video, I wanted to create and decode my own fictional locale and unearth an image-based, psychological space from Nabokov’s linear narrative.

Before shooting the video material, however, I forced myself to choose another medium as a filter to interpret certain images further. The medium I chose was painting. Concentrating on sketching and painting allowed me to both engage with and detach from the images: as I painted, I had to think about very specific details in the gestures and phenomena I chose to represent, but I also had time to let the images pass through my memory and integrate more with my subjective perceptions of them. I displayed these paintings along with some notebook pages and rough storyboard sketches at the In-Progress exhibition at the Jake. I also took some photos that I ended up not displaying at the exhibition, but they still helped me further consider ideas in composition, just in more of an impulsive manner than painting.

When I finally started working on the actual video, I had a couple of goals in mind. I wanted to construct a world where artifacts and phenomenal nature are oppressive, and then make that feeling move. And, as I said before, I wanted to create my own fictional bizarre locale, and I wanted that locale to aid in deconstructing the wearying feeling of the artifacts and phenomenal nature sequencing. The resulting video works to create an environment rooted in the present, simultaneously engaging and challenging the viewer to appraise the value of a single moment.

I like to preface videos with a quotations, so here’s one from “Signs and Symbols”:

“He must always be on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things.”

amplified present from Claire Fox on Vimeo.

In inhabiting this boy’s perspective, I attempted to turn his subjective experience into something to be collectively experienced. Though I’m primarily approaching the work from his perspective, we as viewers have our own attachments to the images we see, so we struggle to integrate the two as we gaze at the images on the screen. In this way, I invite viewers to engage in that perspective along with me, and decide for themselves based on their interaction with the piece whether the presence of nature and artifacts is oppressive, or maybe liberating, relaxing, or something else completely. And, by way of the bizarre locale, I hope to engage viewers’ memories, allowing the images to linger and take on beauty later.

So, with that in mind, I want to leave you with one final quotation from Chris Marker’s gorgeous film, Sans Soleil:

“I think of a world where each memory could create its own legend.”

I'm a diehard Portlander, but I spent two years of my high school career at Phillips Academy, a school outside of Boston, learning the ways of the East Coast. I had some pretty rad teachers at that school, in particular a dude named Edwin Quattlebaum, who taught my 8:30am modern European history class. He was the very first teacher I experienced at ol' Andover. Because of that, I felt that he always had my back. I was a little out of my league back East, and I think he understood my West Coast sensibility more than most people did, maybe since he was a Berkeley student when the city was under martial law.

Here's the email exchange. Things worth noting: we often reference the Rolling Stones in emails, Palmer is one of the editors of the history book we used in his class, I played a lot of volleyball in high school, and I <33333333 Dr. Quattlebaum.

from Claire Fox
to equattlebaum@andover.edu
date Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 9:28 PM
subject american history, james spader, research
mailed-by gmail.com

hey dr. quattlebaum,

i have a question for you in the name of arts and humanities research. i have this memory of history 340 when you were describing james spader to us kids, and you mentioned that you were teaching a particular time period (in hist 300, i think) where mr. spader became obsessed with a particular event within that time period and researched it with a couple buddies, never really moving on from that moment, even as the course progressed and eventually left him behind.

if you remember what i'm talking about (and i realize this is a pretty inane question): do you remember what that moment in history was that consumed james spader's attention? i'm indirectly using it to justify some research i'm doing.

also: HI! how have you been? what's new? i hope all's well in andover.

it's only rock n roll (but i like it),
claire (fox '06)

from Edwin G Quattlebaum
to Claire Fox
date Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 11:46 AM
subject RE: american history, james spader, research
mailed-by andover.edu

Dear Claire,
Great to hear from you.
You have an amazing -- Palmer-like -- memory, for the IMPORTANT things of History 340.
Your recollection is absolutely correct. The topic was the scandal in the Andrew Jackson administration, from 1829-1837, and it involved the alleged loose morals of one Peggy Eaton, in about 1830. I think one of Jackson's cabinet members, perhaps John Timberlane?, wanted to marry her, and all the other Cabinet-members' wives developed catty hatred for her. But Old Hickory himself stuck up for her, partly because his beloved late & lamented dead wife had suffered similar cattiness from Cabinet wives?
Something like that.
Google it. Smithsonian Magazine had a big article on it, I think, and JT [my nickname for him] obsessed in a hilarious fashion about
the whole scandal, although he may not have done a whole lot of research about it. But he sure talked a good game.
As for Rock 'n' Roll, it was Billy Joel: "It's All Rock 'n' Roll to Me." Itunes it.
Hope you are still living in Portland, Oregon, and still spiking a million volleyballs.
As ever,
Ed Q.

I made a video awhile back and wrote an essay about it.

familiar, yet absurd from Claire Fox on Vimeo.

Whenever I attempt to create a piece of video art, I consider the responsibilities I have both as an “artist” and as a twenty-year-old in 2008. When considering the writings of theorists like Camus and Sartre, I attempt to create visceral connections between their writings from mid-20th century France to the contemporary social climate of 21st century Seattle. In this particular video, I worked with my friend Michelle Avery to create an experimental documentary that meditates on ideas of familiarity, alienation, sincerity, time, and space in the universe of the absurd.

To begin making any kind of connection between theory and contemporary individuals, I started with a very general consideration of existentialist themes: how do we define ourselves as individuals? Video seemed like a particularly fitting medium for this consideration for two reasons. The first is that video is viewed (at least by me, since I’m new to the medium) as a new, fresh, and fundamentally democratizing method of the artistic expression of ideas: any individual can rent a camera and take digital video without having to shell out a large sum of money or having to exercise a high level of skill. The second is that video considers images differently from film. Again, I have a very rudimentary skill and knowledge level when it comes to video, but it seems as though this medium rests largely on the transitions between images (i.e. it depends largely on choices in editing) than the images themselves (choices made in production). This idea of the importance of transitions over images helps illustrate one of Camus’ ideas about time: “Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life,” he writes, “time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it”. Since I view editing as a process that operates on a much more individual level than production, and the additional manipulation of time can make for an especially disorienting environment where we are forced to consider content outside a simple and automatic framework, it seems as though the video medium is an ideal method for meditating on themes in existentialism.

When it came down to expressing the absurd in video, I felt that I’d either need to make a highly constructed fictional space where I was responsible for every detail, or I’d need to go somewhere where the spatial and aesthetic elements of my space as well as the actions of my subjects were completely out of control. I went into this process from the start with two primary quotations in mind. From Sartre: “We are alone, with no excuses”. From Camus: “At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face”. Considering those two quotations, I decided to make my video into what can be called an experimental documentary. I was especially enamored with the idea of the absurd happening without warning on the street and I don’t feel that that kind of sincere realization can be constructed (at least not yet by me, with my amateur level of video skill), so I decided to take one subject - Michelle - and put her somewhere on the street (“alone, with no excuses”) and make her talk.

This type of footage was both simple and difficult to take. Though there was no setup involved, I had essentially taken a friend who was more or less aware of my intentions, put her in an open psychological space over which she had rudimentary control, and waited for something absurd to happen. It was likely that nothing would happen, and arguably, that’s the way events panned out: for Michelle, there was no wide-eyed moment of mental lucidity where she stopped speaking and considered her setting with the eyes of someone newly set adrift. We had, however, a very special setting working for us. We shot the footage in Georgetown, which is very close to the Boeing airfield. Michelle has always been a plane enthusiast and even owns a book of airplanes, which she studies for the sake of being able to identify them from the street. She is highly aware of airplane presence in any neighborhood, but in Georgetown, this awareness was acute. Georgetown functioned as a sort of exacerbated environment, one where planes flew low overhead and couldn’t be ignored by anyone: whenever a plane passed overhead, people (who lived in the neighborhood) would all look up, whether they were sitting on the curb, driving in a car, or whatever else. Michelle couldn’t stop laughing.

That type of setting represents a fundamental idea in Camus’ thought.

“A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity”.

I aimed to make the structure of this video hinge on the moments when Michelle is distracted from the interview by planes flying overhead. This idea lent itself to furthering the contemplating of individualism in two ways. One was that when Michelle turned or looked up to observe a plane or covered her face after it went by, we got to know Michelle through her gestures and actions in addition to the ideas she articulated verbally. The other more important idea was that these moments where she couldn’t help but look up, Michelle was removed from her very self-aware method of speaking or considering ideas. She couldn’t help but look. She couldn’t help but smile. She was briefly divorced from her life and her setting and put into an exacerbated, unfamiliar, and very present space. She was without words or memories and could only focus on the sounds and sight that overwhelmed her senses.

In terms of the aesthetic of the actual shot, I took some inspiration from a Sartre quotation.

“It is necessary that his very thought should at every instant surpass the intimate contradiction which unites the comprehension of man-as-agent with the knowing of man-as-object and that it forge new concepts, new determinations of Knowledge which emerge from the existential comprehension and which regulate the movement of their contents by its dialectical procedure”.

I’m almost positive that I’m assigning incorrect meaning to this quotation, but when I considered my image composition, I looked for distinctly competing images to work with to function as a sort of dialectic. I realize this sounds superficial and naïve, but I needed my shot to be animated. What I mean by this is that there was a lot of responsibility weighing on that particular shot because it was the only shot I had to work with for the entire film. While I hoped that the static imagery would lend itself to our focused contemplation of Michelle as a human individual, I knew I couldn’t be lazy about her backdrop. The competing left and right sides of the image have their own story, even without Michelle present, which can arguably place Michelle in a context where she can both be considered “man-as-agent” (in the content of her verbal interview) and “man as object” (something that is subject to and reacts to its setting).

On the left, we see many angular, mechanical, lifeless images with dull colors. In the background, the large, black side of a truck bed reads “ALL METALS. There’s a piece of corrugated steel cutting Michelle’s image in half, where she rests her belongings. There’s a rusty old pickup in the background, giving some idea that these angles, which lead about 45 degrees to the upper right-hand corner of the screen, and imposing structure, as it were, are getting old and tired. What animates this image is the visceral organic presence on the right side of the screen. There’s a lot of wiry, unrelenting blackberry bush overgrowth, which seems to be getting the best of the old machinery on the right side of the screen, and there’s an especially wiry thistle that sprouts up in the middle of the screen and stands among the overgrowth and the other slight angles with Michelle. Michelle is intersected by old lines of structured metal, but in her more vulnerable and unguarded moments, she sometimes stands among the overgrowth and more organic images that characterize the right side of the screen.

One thing in particular in the image knocked both me and Michelle out from the time I was shooting: the dead bird in the lower left hand corner. It’s lying there, unacknowledged, in front of Michelle in one of the indents of the corrugated steel. In the duality of this image based on the structure and the overgrowth, this bird adds the element of death to the image. There is so much animation in the space just based on the colors and the stark contrast in composition from one side to the other, and then that little bird, which can go so unnoticed at the bottom of the screen, not really even recognizable in the graniness of the image, gives a sense of finality. We can ignore death, we can ignore dead organic things, but they’re still there as objects and they still represent the end of a lifespan.

The actual content of the interview was extremely difficult to edit and pair with Michelle’s gestures. As said, I hoped that we could get to know Michelle through her gestures in addition to her speech, and so to operate on these two levels, the content and the gestures needed to be very clearly linked. In addition, I knew that the video would need to be short because as animated a character as Michelle is, a viewer can only stay with a single image for so long. I ended up dividing the video into two loose sections: one where Michelle is describing herself (“I wish…I think…I don’t give a shit…”) and another where Michelle is describing other people, or the “they-self” (“What you’ve seen…what you’ve been told…people don’t realize…”). The idea of the airplane is used in this sequencing again. In the first section, I try to imply that Michelle is more self-aware in that she only mimics the plane and we don’t feel its actual presence. In the second section, I try to imply that Michelle is being removed from her setting and forced to articulate other perspectives by showing her actual reactions to the airplane flying overhead, even though we never see the actual vehicle.

These two sections are bookended by Michelle’s contemplation of her family. We begin the piece with her bitter contemplation of the idea that her family may never understand her. This poses the question: Should we care about expressing ourselves to people whom we think will never understand us? In the second-to-last clip, I return to this idea where she explains the process of contextualizing herself within her family, but she is interrupted by a particularly low-flying airplane. At that point, we disregard the question and transition to her analysis of the other things she said in the interview: “Maybe that’s my way of being an individual: not being an individual.” The implications of this statement are pretty huge and potentially contradictory with the ideas represented by Camus and Sartre. I’m still undecided what she means by that statement: is she giving up on humanity and shirking the responsibility of existence preceding essence?: “When we say that man chooses his own self, we mean that every one of us does likewise; but we also mean by that that in making this choice he also chooses all men”. Or is she turning inward and re-contextualizing Camus’ “constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity” in a media-saturated-21st century way?

All I know for sure is that she’s sincere.

Here's my essay on Godard's La Chinoise, as promised. It's so fresh that I haven't even read over it since turning it in to my professor.
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Reality of the Reflection

“The socialist literature and art must fight on two fronts. Art doesn’t reflect reality, but is a reality of reflection.” - Kirilov in Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise

In 1967, Jean-Luc Godard released La Chinoise, his thirteenth feature film. The work follows four French youth who align themselves with Maoist communism in their search to find meaning in their lives. Through a series of documentary-style vignettes collaged with pop art and arranged into a linear narrative, La Chinoise shows the characters seeking great leaps forward based on Mao’s philosophy and aiming to coordinate a communist revolution in France for the benefit of its citizens.

In May of 1968, the student protests and general strike considered to be the catalyst for France’s shift in social morality occurred. Now, in 2008, La Chinoise does not exist on DVD, and is only available for viewing when its film print is shown in theaters.

There is a very real possibility that the release of La Chinoise, the protests in 1968 France, and the current inaccessibility of the film are not connected; however, the three ideas in a group can represent the role of art in social impact.

After a recent viewing of the film at Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum, a middle-aged man asked me if I’d liked it. I answered him simply: I thought the film was fantastic. Despite the dramatic irony supplied by its dating, the story felt fresh and the cinematography and general artistic risk-taking was unlike anything I’d seen. The man scoffed at me, and I realized he’d been looking for something a little more scathing. I asked him what he thought, and he response was something to the extent of

“I found it self-indulgent and narrow-minded. You know who the main character was? The director. And I think he’s got the wrong idea about the value of collective action. You can’t just go around killing people and think that it will solve society’s problems. The people in power don’t always do what they should, but individuals can’t change that. You know Barack Obama? He wants to send more troops to Iraq. There’s no one we can trust anymore, and those selfish kids in that movie set a bad example of social action.”

Though I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, the man’s outburst had me floored. Incorrect assertions aside, that interaction can represent a complicated idea that’s present in most socially-conscious work of today. The film, which is classified as a fictional work (though it could easily be argued otherwise) seemed to soften the intersection between social responsibility and beautiful art in a method of changing peoples’ perspectives on the causes they address. In the case of the man I spoke to, this purpose was clearly not achieved: he only reacted to the social content. Though the film could probably stand alone on either side of the argument (social commentary vs. piece of art for art’s sake), it provides a good representation of what is referred to in La Chinoise as “the struggle on two fronts”: the attempt to make a work that successfully addresses a social issue while making it available to a larger audience through artistic accessibility.

DEUXIÈME MOVEMENT D’ESSAI

La Chinoise’s level of success as a reconciliation of the two sides of the struggle and generally as an artistic piece of social commentary can be examined through the theories of Kant and Nietzsche. Both theorists write on the pursuit of truth’s animation through the reconciliation of two different worlds - for Kant, noumena and phenomena, and for Nietzsche, for the Apollonian and the Dionysian - which relates directly to Godard’s struggle on two fronts. Relating more specifically to redemption aside from truth, however, both theorists also advance the idea of going through and then destroying beauty as a method of liberation that resonates well with La Chinoise.

TROISIÈME MOVEMENT D’ESSAI

We can first take a look at beauty and responsibility in the one of the documentary-style interviews with Guillaume - one of the film’s principle characters - in the second portion of the film, where he begins rehearsing the first few lines from a play he’s practicing and then stops, laughs a little, and then explains “Yes, I’m an actor.” At this point, we are introduced to the idea of “true theater,” which Guillaume advances as the idea that everyone is an actor at all times reflecting on true situations, and that just because he is an actor (which we see by the questions asked of him off set and the turning of the camera on the cameraman) we should never doubt the sincerity of his words.

He follows up this beautiful idea of sincerity’s necessity in social critique and art with the assertion (in the same breath) that you also need violence. He takes one idea, for example by rehearsing an idea of the cultural Marxist, Louis Althusser: “I turn around, and suddenly the question is the words I’ve just said are part of a greater play continuing through me,” and then makes it his own: “the play of the worker in the theater.”

We can begin to understand Guillaume’s assertions through Kant’s thinking. In his Critique of Judgment, Kant writes on new methods of judgment as well as a new method of looking at the movement inspired by beauty and truth. We see a definition of two distinct worlds of existence: one of natural necessity, and one of freedom. This division between nature’s objective, deterministic laws and moral freedom’s subjectivity is not unlike Plato’s division between the sensory and intelligible realms; however, it is not based on a dialectic where an individual can ascend or descend within those two realms on their journey toward a single One. Here, the two worlds - the sensory, subjective world of the noumena and the intelligible, objective world of the phenomena -are animated via their need for some sort of unity, which can occur through a supersensible substrate: art.

Throughout this film, we sense a need for the students to be able to apply their theories to real life; they need to find a way to apply their facts, which are based on the objective assertions of the collective workers ethos and Mao’s Little Red Book, to the rest of the world. They become obsessed with the idea of devoting themselves to a cause and being completely engrossed in their endeavors, ensuing in a fanatical study of Mao’s doctrines and subscribing to the Cultural Revolution in China. In so doing, however, we could doubt their sincerity just due to the fact that they are trying to “struggle on two fronts”: that they are focusing their energy both on their art - acting - and on supporting their cause.

Guillaume pleads that we don’t doubt, and instead only realize that a film can be the work of a collective group of people who share in similar ideas and should therefore be taken very seriously in their methods of demonstration.

Kant’s distinction between the analytic of the beautiful and the sublime also lends itself to an examination of this film. “[Nature] excites the ideas of the sublime in its chaos or in its wildest and most irregular disorder and desolation, provided size and might are perceived,” he writes (Kant, 84). And as for its redemptive value? “[In] general, it displays nothing purposive in nature itself, but only in that possible use of our intuitions of it by which there is produced in us a feeling of purposiveness quite independent of nature.” The idea of a strange kind of uneasiness leading to great joy connects to another of the film’s interviews where Veronique, arguably the leader of the group, looks the camera in the eye and explains that she would dynamite the Sorbonne (education), the Louvre (visual art), and the Comedie Francaise (theater) if she had the courage, just for the sake of starting over from zero and reconsidering our morals from the present, based on the collective (size-based) ethos. She tells us that the Revolution can’t be art: it can’t hold the tenderness or finesse of a piece, but rather it rips away all that we know and forces us to begin from the present, starting from scratch.

We can also see a representation of this ideology Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, where he provides us with the examination of the Dionysian-Apollonian duality within Greek tragedy. The Greek tragedy, Nietzsche writes, is the only instance where the mutually exclusive Dionysian and the Apollonian are united - and are united only for a moment - and in that moment of reconciliation we have a glimpse into whatever reality we can conceive (though Nietzsche writes that we can never know the thing itself). As said in the film: art isn’t a reflection of reality, it’s the reality of reflection.

The Apollonian wisdom is that of dreams, which is purely based on images and allows appearances to appear at all. These images, which are also referred to (among other things) as masks, are able to cloud the dark chaos that Nietzsche believes characterizes the world. As such, forgetting is a fundamentally Apollonian characteristic, which also allows individuals to trust in their own individual frameworks via their faith in their own autonomous ego. The Dionysian wisdom, on the other hand, is the wisdom of terror and is specifically characterized by the awe of and resulting drunkenness relating to that terror. As said, Nietzsche believes the universe is ultimately is irrational and wants to devour everything. Dionysus, as the representation of this belief and the primal heart of the world, breaks down the barriers developed and sustained by the individual trust in Apollonian aesthetics: “Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but Nature which has become estranged, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her prodigal son, man […] Now the slave is free; now all the stubborn, hostile barriers, which necessity, caprice, or ‘shameless fashion’ have erected between man and man, are broken down” (Nietzsche, 501). When the barriers between man and man (and man and Nature) are broken down, man senses his participation in universal harmony and a higher community and experiences a “redemption through release” (Nietzsche, 508). This redemption, Nietzsche writes, is deserving of a “rapturous vision” and further fuels the Dionysian energy as it is the closest portal to reality man can possess.

Kant finds some unity with Nietzsche based on the concepts of the sublime with Nietzsche’s idea of the redemption of Dionysis. Dionysian unity tears down Apollonian principium individuationis, thereby ripping away the Apollonian masks to expose reality. As Nietzsche writes, there is a certain satisfaction to this deconstruction: “The horrible ‘witches’ brew’ of sensuality and cruelty becomes ineffective: only the curious blending and duality in the emotions of the Dionysian revelers remind us - as medicines remind us of deadly poisons - of the phenomenon that pain begets joy, that ecstasy may wring sounds of agony from us” (Nietzsche, 504). We see further application of Veronique’s theory in the film in her long, static scene on the train with her professor when she discusses, in complete earnest, her intentions to bomb the universities as a method of reevaluating their abysmal situation which is tired and complacent, even in the face of the Vietnam War. Her professor, who was involved in the Algerian War, explains that she will never find any lasting support unless she has popular backing at the time of her bombings, and she only had control of three people in a movement.

DERNIÈRE MOVEMENT D’ESSAI

As suggested before, the idea of the struggle on two fronts as well as the idea of ripping way apathetic, indifferent exteriors in favor of the reality that lies beneath and starting from scratch at the present isn’t just applicable to La Chinoise’s content: it’s also applicable to the film’s aesthetic and technical elements.

Godard’s innovative filmmaking ethos expertly walks the line between social commentary and work of art. From the beginning, the film doesn’t let the viewer a rest or retreat into a streamlined narrative. Though the narrative progresses in a somewhat linear fashion, we are often subjected to a different form of blurring fiction and reality. As said, this film is based on a fictional narrative of four students living together in a comfortable Parisian apartment over the summer, and the narrative works in a circle that begins and ends on the same image of their apartment doors, giving us the perception that nothing has been accomplished in the film, but within that revolution (as in a circle), we are engrossed in various vignettes. To further complicate ideas, the art of the film varies between scenes full of jump cuts between images of the actors as well as collages of pop art. Though the alignment of visual art with images of human actors may prompt some explicit questions, they do more to excite a feeling rather than actually promote any further understanding of the subject.

Godard additionally creates a new sphere with his audience as viewer-listeners rather that just viewers alone, which is a hugely significant part of his filmmaking. Rather than just being able to lose ourselves in a progression of images, the sounds he uses keep us off-balance, never let us sit back, make sure that we’re still extremely present. It makes us experience the rejection of passivity that he’s trying to support. This experiencing of emotions is what makes La Chinoise so riveting, and what gives it a redemptive power that even the man who talked to me after the film had to understand. Which brings us back to Kant’s original point: we don’t necessarily all have to agree that La Chinoise is a great film, but we should all feel a certain way about its effects.

There is a notable scene relating to the power of music which may be a caricature, but still raises a valuable point. As Kirilov, another of the comrades, lectures the others on socialist art and literature’s need to struggle on two fronts - in other words, to have a moral purpose behind its beauty, just as Godard attempts to do - Guillaume considers the idea and then claims that it is much too complicated, asserting that he wouldn’t be able to make sense of two things at once. At that point Veronique, his girlfriend, asks him if he loves her, as she had done before in the film.

“Of course I do,” he responds.

“Well, I don’t love you anymore.”

He stares at her, bewildered, and says that he doesn’t understand. “You will,” she replies, and she lets a record drop and aligns the needle. As the music begins to play, she says,

“I don’t love you anymore. I don’t like your face, and I don’t care for your sweaters. And you bore me terribly.” She removes the needle from the record. “Understand now?”

He responds in the affirmative.

“You see? You can understand two things at once - you’ve just done it.”

I'll start this with a promise: I will post here, and I will post regularly (if not often). For now, I'll leave you with a fragment of Nudge, an arts publication and project of mine that's lately been taking up a significant amount of my thought capacity. I started working Nudge back in October, when I was trying to find people who would want to make videos with me. This proved obscenely difficult, so I set up a Facebook group for an arts publication and waited for people to respond. Long story short, I found people to make videos with and other things, too.

We published our first issue, which is more or less a traditional publication with submissions and editors, back in January. Below is my letter from the editor. I hope you read it and like it, and then we'll talk again soon.

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Dear friends,

I’m a big fan of Beck. I can’t think of any artist, musically-inclined or otherwise, who is so successfully both plastic and genuine. Though I adore Beck’s original language (I like writing; I like metaphors), I also love the language he fuels. In his most recent album, Beck somehow managed to pin down writer Dave Eggers and director Spike Jonze and make them converse on one of the album tracks about the “ultimate record that ever could possibly be made.” One comment has remained with me above all:

“[The album] has to tell you how to live. As an instruction guide. It’s subtle. It doesn’t push, it nudges. It entices. Or seduces. It has to encompass the whole world, everything that has been, is, and will be […]”

You probably see where I’m going with this.

You’re holding something very fresh. This assemblage of paper, ink, and metal is called Nudge. The University of Washington’s writers, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers can submit their work here so other people can see it and think about it. The publication, however, does not stand alone. There is a community behind it. It’s relatively large, and it gains new members nearly every day.

This is where the nudging comes in.

Though this beautiful and holdable publication is Nudge’s most visible form, Nudge exists to create a community where the UW’s writers, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers can see who else is creating new work, give each other feedback on that work, meet new people, get famous, whatever. What’s important here is that collaboration between people and artistic medias are involved.

Now is the time for artistic collaboration at the University of Washington. There’s a new advising hub for students of the artistic variety, called ArtsLink. The Henry recently established a student advisory committee. Intermission has an increasingly large number of restless journalists joining its staff. Bricolage is revamping its mission. An inspired group of poets who call themselves Stray has joined together to form a collective.

Nudge is for the people who are willing to push themselves beyond their limits and attempt works in forms, genres, ideas, and methods that hold the possibility of incredible success (however that may be defined), but also miserable failure. We look to reject art’s obnoxious tendency to be untouchable. The only thing at Nudge that is untouchable is our dedication to risking elitism and irrelevance for the sake of our art.

Anyway. Like most dialogue, the conversation between Eggers and Jonze continues. In the same breath as the quotation from above:

“[…] and you could take it into space, and that’s why you need a spaceship. Because that’s ultimately what space travel is all about, is sending our ship from earth into space. And not just in some, like, space shuttle that has all the foam coming off of it, you need your own, glowing, you know, multicolored spaceship.”

Stay tuned. There’s more to come.

Until next time,
Claire