Jean-Marie Straub, 2020. Text: Georges Bernanos, from La France Contre Les Robots, 1947.
"pour Jean-Luc"

Famous leftist filmmaker uses the words of a Catholic monarchist. The man is walking by lake Geneva. In the US, Straub's films, almost all made with his late wife Danielle Huillet, are represented by an art gallery, a luxury boutique, where Alain Badiou comes to speak. Chantal Akerman was also represented by a gallerist.

Monarchism and communism have a lot in common.
I shouldn't have to add any of that but Americans are stupid.

The university belongs, like the church and the military, to the social institutions that are situated at a considerable distance from democracy and adhere to premodern power structures.

memories.

Academic freedom predates free speech. Although Prussia gave constitutional protection to Lehrfreiheit in 1850 (“science and its teaching shall be free”), academic freedom generally does not enjoy legal protection outside of contractual guarantees; rather, it rests on the authority and ability of a community of competent scholars to police their own discourse and on the willingness of universities to affirm this authority and ability.

[I'd forgotten the first reply to Rauchway was Aaron Swartz. ]

Bernd Hüppauf explains why I have more sympathy for dilettantes than pedants. I'm sure he's a good German, a right-thinking Zionist. But Ronell is pathetic.

repeats: Nussbaum and Butler,

The self-described liberal philosopher and Zionist Martha Nussbaum famously launched an attack on the self-described radical philosopher Judith Butler; Butler now is in the position of defending the liberalism that Nussbaum claims to represent. There's nothing radical to her argument; it's a basic defense of civil and legal rights. 

 Zizek

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Gessen links to Leiter. She'd referred to "a conservative philosophy blog" but removed the word after he complained. He'd added an introduction to the post replying to her, linking to his posts tagged "The Hermeneutics of Suspicion", but removed it later. As always the one thing beyond suspicion is himself. As I said in comments elsewhere to people who should know or know better: he's opposed to freedom of speech except when he's not; the only reason to have women on the Supreme Court is "fairness" since there's no epistemological advantage; theology is a Wissenschaft, but Derrida's a fraud.  "Calling yourself a leftist because you've read Marx is like calling yourself a feminist because you're read The Second Sex." A good line.

it's just turning into a series of notes

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and again: The Masha Gessen piece in the New Yorker. wow.
It even has Kris Kraus to remind me again how much the art world high seriousness of the 80's was all really just Woody Allen. I realized that, or saw it for the first time in 1990, watching a film by Yvonne Rainer. I expected something much different, something tough, maybe like what I saw later with Chantal Akerman -when I finally saw the Jeanne Dielman-  and Claire Denis. But in this country now we get I Love Dick on Amazon.

The Euros never succeed in lying to themselves so much. [Or maybe they're just better at it. It never seems like denial.] I really don't mind European indulgence; there's an honesty to it.  American sincerity, the Puritan streak, makes for anger, and a kind of inarticulate, non-verbal, physical power: Trio A and post minimalism. [or rock and roll] But when intellectualism takes over it becomes pedantry. It all fits.

None of this is about US culture as a whole, only about the stuff that proudly wears an air of high seriousness. Puritanism affects everything. American artists read literary theory. American novelists don't.

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updated, a mishmash

Leiter on Ronell again (see previous)

There are more important things going on, but it's still...

Prof. Ronell has issued a statement denying all of the plaintiff's allegations. I am not sure this statement helps her case. First, the statement acknowledges that at the very same time that the plaintiff was sending affectionate-sounding e-mails to Prof. Ronell he was describing her to others as a "monster." That would seem to support the plaintiff's account that he felt pressured into behaving as Ronell wanted him to behave. 

a "monster"

• “Mon Avital, beloved and special one... [link] I don’t know how I would have survived without you. You are the best, my joy, my miracle. Sending you infinite love, kisses and devotion, your – n.” (6/29/13);
• “Thank you most darlingst. On this rainy day I too hold you and thank you for everything”. (12/6/2014);
• “Sweet Beloved, I was so happy to see you tonight, and spend time together. It was so magical and important, crucial on [sic] so many ways. Our shared intimacy was a glorious cadence to our time in Berlin. Thank you for these moments of togetherness and utter and pure love!...Infinitely, - n” (1/17/2015);
• My beloved Avital, Just sending you infinite kisses and love. Thank you for your being my most precious blessing. Loving, your – n. (3/16/2013);
• “Beloved...Missing you and loving you ! – n” (2/4/2015);
• “Baby. It was so wonderful seeing you today. You looked wonderful...I miss you
• terribly and await seeing you already...”(2/13/2015);
• “Honig most, dearest one...Sending love and misses. Je t’embrasse”.
• (03/19/2015); and
• “Dearest, I have not heard from you all through this oriental trip...Please drop me a line to let me know you are well, I have been worried about you...hugs, n”. (7/29/2015). [Written after Reitman received his doctoral decree].

As a matter of law, if women are easily swayed by dashing hucksters or sleazy sycophants, then so are men. If women are weak and fragile, so are men. Life is more complex. As usual, Leiter is incapable of separating the two.
I have no particular sympathy for Ronell. It's a soap opera. At worst they deserve each other.

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And now Asia Argento.

But in the months that followed her revelations about Mr. Weinstein last October, Ms. Argento quietly arranged to pay $380,000 to her own accuser: Jimmy Bennett, a young actor and rock musician who said she had sexually assaulted him in a California hotel room years earlier, when he was only two months past his 17th birthday. She was 37. The age of consent in California is 18.

That claim and the subsequent arrangement for payments are laid out in documents between lawyers for Ms. Argento and Mr. Bennett, a former child actor who once played her son in a movie.

The documents, which were sent to The New York Times through encrypted email by an unidentified party, include a selfie dated May 9, 2013, of the two lying in bed. As part of the agreement, Mr. Bennett, who is now 22, gave the photograph and its copyright to Ms. Argento, now 42. Three people familiar with the case said the documents were authentic.

She fucked a 17 year old and he blackmailed her. If Weinstein merely had a thing for teenagers I wouldn't have said much, but he's much more than that.

Law is a blunt instrument.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, of whom I have only had positive feelings up to now, has produced an opinion for the Ethicist column for the New York Times that it is “a good thing” when citizens report violations of immigration law to the US authorities. He produces this opinion in the context of a question about “green-card marriage” entered into merely in order to gain an immigration advantage, so it is unclear how far he relies on the specific features of the case he describes to generate a more general moral conclusion, but I, for one, find his reasons highly problematic.

...Kwame Anthony Appiah has just blocked me on twitter. My only interaction with him ever was writing this post disagreeing with him. (I had a long term plan to get him to unveil some memorial in Bristol to his grandfather Stafford Cripps and to give a talk – I guess I can forget that). What a remarkable reaction.

I can mock Bertram—and again recently on the same subject—and still have more contempt for Appiah, who considers himself a cosmopolitan while having no idea what it means to be one.

Back to Jian Ghomeshi and Marie Henein. The post above fairly or not puts Reitman in the role of Ghomeshi. Women and other groups play at a handicap. The question is the relation of that handicap to law. If you follow the link above and link through to the first post on Ghomeshi and more importantly his lawyer, you'll see Leiter and Wissenschaft, again, as in the first post linked above on Ronell.

Repeating something I wrote elsewhere, responding to Jeremy Waldron:
Loyalty holds society together; we don't want everyone snitching on their neighbors; we need police to be our pedants. But police become loyal to each other: cops hate Serpico; on 9/11/01 I watched thoughtless people acting on reflex drive into Manhattan to dig in the rubble.

continuing.

It's frustrating also reading articles about Akerman. Her friends are too protective and fans are worshipful. Her mother's last words in Akerman's last film, recorded by the camera when Akerman was out of the room, were that her daughter talks to her all the time but never tells her anything important about what's going on in her life. Akerman over the years had said the same thing about her mother; she described the holocaust as an unspoken presence in her childhood. The moments of banter in No Home Movie are a sham. The film records missed connections, none more extreme than in the penultimate scene, when Akerman is set to leave. By including the footage and using it to imply it's the last time she saw her mother alive, Akerman is damning herself for her callousness.

The overdetermined formalism of what was called "structural" filmmaking, when it wasn't simply the product of pedantry, was connected with trauma. Discussions of Paul Sharits as an artist of some sort of Greenbergian abstraction are absurd.


The connection is to Warhol and Robert Wilson


N+1 publishes a mash note to "Chantal" written by an expert in "brand semiotics" at Truthco. [archive.org]  Scott Hamrah, who "has worked in almost every brand category there is, from automotive and beauty to liquor and finance, from hotel chains and media to candy and pharmaceuticals," says Akerman "ended up a Simone Weil of the cinema..." He'd probably say the same thing about Aaron Swartz and tech.

The tragedy of Akerman is the tragedy of self-absorption and self-punishing narcissism. That was the material she worked with; others just wallow in it. It's the difference between wanting to yell at the screen and wanting to walk out of the theater. It's disgusting how much this country is still founded on optimism

Akerman's long takes are not the product of intellectual, cerebral, distance; they originate in the passive observation by children of the world of adults. Seyrig and Mangolte added an aggression both behind and in front of the camera that Akerman was incapable of. But having seen only Je, Tu, il, Elle my first experience of what I sensed as looking through the female gaze was I Can't Sleep, by Claire Denis, Agnes Godard, and Nelly Quettier.

I'm not done with any of this.

The audience was composed mainly of young people, of the age of college students or recent graduates, and, after the screening, they were eager to engage Akerman in discussion about the film. A young woman sitting behind me raised her hand; Akerman called on her, and the viewer asked a fairly complex question filled with academic language. Akerman responded sharply, “Is that how you talk to your friends?” The woman stayed silent; Akerman persisted, asking whether the question represented the way that the young woman talks in real life and wondering why that’s the way she chose to talk to Akerman.

Thinking about Akerman over the years I paid too much attention to idiots like the one above. The only film by Akerman I'd seen, years ago, was Je, Tu, Il, Elle, which I didn't like much. It was too much about ideas rather than experience. I don't like conceptualism and I hated Hollis Frampton. Michael Snow was something else. He had an eye; he placed the camera and framed a view that was both well designed (it did its job) and idiosyncratic. His films described the personal rather than talking about it (La Région Centrale is high concept romantic landscape). But last week I watched a few interviews with Akerman, and they were all painful to watch. My sympathy was immediate and agreement with her almost absolute.

And somehow it had slipped my mind that I'd spent four months sitting in on a small class of about 10 people with Babette Mangolte. Mangolte has a brilliant eye, and was the best artist as teacher I've ever had.

Chantal was very clear about the character and the character had nothing to do with who Delphine Seyrig was, who plays Jeanne Dielman. Really the opposite of  Bresson who cast somebody who looked the part in order to shape that person as if they were clay so he could do with them what he wished. In a film you need to have the stylization of a certain distance, Chantal knew that. Film is not realism. It's not neorealism. Delphine was perfect for the role: first she was a great actress and she had the intelligence of knowing how you communicated the drama, the unfolding and break down of a woman. It's not melodrama, it's a woman who is unsettled and falling apart.

Really, without her [Seyrig], the film does not exist. You see, she's key to the imagination of the film and why the stylisation of the character works. Delphine was an actress able to make an interpretation and not be the real thing. The key to the film Jeanne Dielman, is making Jeanne Dielman a character embodying a certain archetype, which at the time had not been expressed in film.

The film would have fallen apart without the performance, and Mangolte's eye.

Saute ma ville ends in suicide. No Home Movie ends in despair. But the first is about the idea and her last makes you feel it, even if five minutes earlier you wanted to yell at the screen in frustration at the same onscreen character, Akerman, whose sadness breaks your heart as the screen goes black.

It became the first of two.

Marian Goodman continues to be one one of the best dealers in NY partly because she tries to come to terms with the conflicts between the old and new models of art; a conflict related to that between old and new models of journalism and media distribution. Fine art descends both from the monarchy and the high church, and relating itself to philosophy, deals in objects that carry pretensions to being something more than entertainment. Monetary value (of one of a kind objects) and philosophical value are related. This is why the mechanical reproduction of "art" precipitated a crisis. The art world has never come to terms with Shakespeare, just as philosophy has never come to terms with theater and "performance".

Pierre Huyghe


The current show includes a feature length film available only in an edition of 9, which is absurd. Does that detract from the film itself? What kind of film gets shown in an art gallery?  Questions for another day.

Goodman also represents Chantal Akerman, William Kentridge and Steve McQueen.


"Today there is no denying that narrative films are not only 'art' —not often good art, to be sure, but this applies to other media as well— but also, besides architecture, cartooning and 'commercial design,' the only visual art entirely alive.
Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” 1934