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