river of fundament

the shit

 

any nonironic hagiography is doomed to puerility and then to pick normal malest as your serious saint - well isn't this a cringey error in aesthetic and spiritual judgment - what a sturm and dragger - didn't goethe dismiss him 209 years prior - a guru intellect wanker only those unacquainted with ancient nights could pedestalize

 

and clearly an obsession with the namefest club - boring except for gossip columnists and petty simian clamberers

 

consequently the wake conversations are the most insufferable of the five point five hours particularly in act one and as it progresses from commonplace trite exchanges to drugs sex drunkenness - yes we know this arc of parties - it becomes more tolerable not because the arc escapes cliche but due to some engaging sonics in a growing contrapuntality between disintegration and respectability

 

the river

 

because it's barney flushing his rare vision down the sewers of film fundament has its moments - less imagistically than in its periodic contra and polypuntal sonics - its injections of solipsistic ravings into societal masking - these are occasionally delightful and engaging

 

but the shit isn't shitty enough - the hagiography grounded in a middling tedious mess of violence muddled spirituality desire - the dial log stifling and trite - the auto amerikana orgy persistently silly

 

of course a devoted serious unflinching silly is partially what barney does but cremaster clearly is the superior silly work -  the symbolic-religious base (freemasonry rather than malest) is vaster and richer - its silliness more integrated with its symbology and flow - cremaster minimizes talk but fundament has waketalk pretending to be artwoke but it's just a yawnjoke - reminding us why we gave up dinner parties long ago

 

the radicality of some form and content sits alongside a conventionality that's neither integrated with the radical nor juxtaposed to it, they each sit there alone and not corresponding, giving the work an unsettling bifurcation not unlike the nondialogical divides of the present

 

ottinger jodorowsky švankmajer more unconventional and original - more of a revolt in content, tarr hadžihalilović schroeter llinás in form

 

considering the violent dispossessed dispossessing spectacle amerika's become specialized at generating, fundament makes sense as one of the edgiest apt cinematic productions to emerge from that land

 

fundament is amerika, far more than project hail mary or dark knight, easy enough to see the tyrant-buffoon onan anal dump as malest's descendant - who wants that family heritage 

 

barney leaves viewers polarized not surprisingly - they love or hate him - after cremaster i loved him, after fundament i hate and love him - excrement i guess has been added - i'm an accomplished scatologist so i'm divided not because of the excrement but as the input forming the shit is too often spiritualized cheesies and deep fried mars bars

 

transmutations

 

fundament's no weirder than land of kush's sand enigma or a significant alternative library of experimental music from the past eighty or so years - which partially shows how unexperimental and closed we are in film compared to music (the situation's even worse in literature as fukky risotto often explores) ... watch fundament as a music video to an updated escalator over the hill, kayn's tektra, muslimgauze's albums from the extreme years, cabaret volaire's methodology 74/78 attic tapes, any of the live long performances of nidus (coroux doell ramolo) or any number of other sophisticated sonic feralities from across the visionary globe

 

cremaster and fundament seem to be a (decadent) attempt to modernize alchemy and place the modernization process on film

 

to object to it as a pretension is primarily to reveal a paucity in the understanding of the ubiquity of pretense, the essential pretense of modernity, and the advanced stages of mental illness of amerika as a republic

let go of enculturated narrative imagistic sonic linear and filmic expectations and rather absorb fundament as a surrealistic comic operatic body horror (that unfortunately gets too often distracted by a sad hagiographization and worn histrionic langwich)

bernadette v. quosego-urborbi

associate poofessor of cliche

senior assistant chair of the school for aesthetic illness

university of olomiet

yamaguchi city

24.08.17

pairings

 

sketches for notes for a draft for something better

 

pairings are well established as a tradition between wine and food yet work themselves out in many spheres : food and sex tomato and basil east and west pb and jelly heat and beach flute and french horn falstaff and henry brutalist and glass pataphysics and daoism

 

today though were going to focus on film which i first remember thinking about when exposed to a curated pairing in an art cinema house that screened buñuels 1962 the exterminating angel followed by ivorys 1972 savages, the latter intentionally created as a companion piece to the former

 

but our fascination is more in pairing films that werent consciously made to be dialogical siblings, in that provocation is often encouraged by juxtaposing the unexpected and unplanned, in that surprise is a friend of invention

 

we find this principle manifest in our physical book library which has no apparent order so that eg woolf and baudelaire converse, jabes and ovid, songling and lispector, prinzhorn and zurn ... rearrange : new dial logs, new thoughts

 

a pairing in film consists then of two films watched sequentially to engender aesthetic spiritual conversations, weve suggested before a quintessential pairing is out 1 and la flor - no one can claim to be a cineaste until theyve done this - although a small more achievable list to start might begin

 

satantango and stalker

ran and el topo

alice (švankmajer) and akira

joy street and t,o,u,c,h,i,n,g

freak orlando and cremaster cycle

              make your own

 

a way to form a pairing is to team with someone who chooses the first viewing and you choose the second, without either consulting the other or knowing the others choice beforehand, this happened to me recently and spontaneously - ie neither of us went into this thinking about pairings and dialogical provocations - when someone staying in my home for a week proposed we each show the other something weve discovered since the last time we met

 

they screened the rehearsal season one and i screened hadžihalilovićs earwig and after watching them in close sequence they sat comparing themselves in my mind

 

the latters a far more mature sophisticated empathic aesthetically cunning work than the former the former rides on cleverness money and cruelty begins the dial log the formers bleak and depressing - while the humour of a notable thematic predecessor borat worked in part because borat entered fully himself into the buffoonery of the play and did so vulnerably on a minimal budget the creator director player in the rehearsal stands aloof on piles of money and so his cleverness becomes pedantry and his humour weary and pathetic ... but earwigs a poetic meditation on (among other things) loss identity family revenge whose sonic and visual scapes are beautiful melancholic distinctive perceptive

 

this is how the conversation begins and i interrogate these initial judgments to develop more comprehensive perspectives on the two works i saw and their relationships

 

im interested now less in my response to or opinions about these creations and more in the possibilities spawned by pairings arranged according to these principles that anyone can do easily at home for aesthetic-spiritual enrichment

tangley m. zan-capoeira

poofessor of sketchy drafts

university of sao wroclaw

portjing city

16.06.22