here’s in a nutshell what i think about this movie of the century (and if my hero, and cyberpunk icon, says it’s great, then it’s great). first off, i think that it carries the eastern-orthodox message that salvation is in this life, in the body and in the ground, because the body and the spirit, like eros and thanatos, are inextricably linked; i’d like to discuss however and in relation to your flagellation book, how we’re to draw the line with masochism and nihilism. second, i think it proposes a marvelous ”new” aesthetics, quotation marks deliberate because the tradition is as old as serbia, where the director, casting himself in the role of Jesus, undergoes crucifixion and in the end death, to undergo a personal cleansing through the body of his artwork; precisely because it is personal, the cleansing also becomes social and creates a strong sense of community, which is why the film didn’t strike me as pessimistic in the end. third, the movie shows you what my idea was with the satire, because me and djordjevic we are a bit like doppelgangers that way. i agree with djordjevic that pornography with a sociopolitical edge has that much-needed subversive streak. now we can expand on these thoughts and you can add any of your own, of course.
I agree with your evaluation, satire. Early in the film the director of the Porno Gang says something about how he’s trying to create a merger or contest of Eros and Thanatos in which Thanatos prevails, and that’s what happens. The two lovers become “eternal travelers” together, so there’s a looking toward the afterlife. But the damnation-redemption happens in this life. The porno gang is an anarcho-syndicalist workers’ commune, but the capitalists and the people, while benefiting from the gang’s work, fuck the gang over. We see the porno gang literally fucking the earth, which brings forth a fucked-up new life that creates delusion and consumerist addiction and undeadness. And the earth fucks the gang in return, when the crude and cruel villagers rape them and the snuff producer coopts their artistic vision with corrupt Western money. In final triumph the director does rid the world of the capitalist exploiters, the porn producer and the snuff producer. But what appears to be a rebirth of the porno gang’s artistic and redemptive vision turns out also to be its curtain call. And I guess that’s the redemption: the final acceleration of the Eros-Thanatos engine, breaking through the boundary between art and life on the artist’s own terms. The show, beginning as a kind of cleansing parody of the culture, being transformed into a sort of grotesque outgrowth of that culture, ultimately becomes an active purifier of the culture.
I hadn’t thought of the Western forces (as represented by Franz, the snuff movie maker) in terms of the undead, but now I see that the metaphor is apt. It seems like they want to stare at the spectacle of dying because they are unable to die themselves (on several occasions the victims complain that their death is being delayed). I am reminded of Shaviro’s early writings in The Cinematic Body about that moment when the protagonists of ”Dawn of the Dead” stare in the zombie’s eyes, and are somehow unable to move despite being able to physically. But, what is the moral then – that life is already death, so that only by dying you can live? It sounds like nihilism, and masochism, but paradoxically I don’t get a negative connotation out of this thought.
* additional explication: when Marko sees Una for the first time, in the theater, she is playing in some nondescript production where she is apparently ”the girl of Kosovo”. This is a reference to the Kosovo myth, and a famous Serbian painting in which the dying soldier, after the battle, gets water from such a girl. I think Kosovo is conjured consciously because of the Orthodox meaning of sacrifice. According to the myth, Serbs were ”moral winners” despite having lost terribly to the much more superior Imperial Turkish army.
Those scenes of killing by the way are so powerfully visceral that they’re not exactly impossible to watch, but certainly imprint themselves in the manner of visions even after repeated viewings, and I had many during the subtitling. Also there were some performances that easily put to shame the entire commercial production of the last ten years, like the psychotic guy with the razor.
The guy with the razor was excellent, his suicidal excitement being palpable and nearly contagious. Was the “girl of Kosovo” the scene in which some porn action is disrupted by a bombing? That was pretty funny.
The live snuff cabaret was strange. Una didn’t think the father of that family deserved to die because he hadn’t committed any sin, the implication being that the other snuff victims had and that the Gang was meting out justice in a way. Then they perform this scene for the decadent rich Americans speaking their lines in English. At the last moment the cops come and break up the show, saving the innocent man. But the would-be snuff victim is in despair: he had reconciled himself to his death, had made a deal to save his family financially, etc. The whole story is repeatedly ambivalent.
The Gang were compromised by Franz and the snuff-for-money scheme. You know what’s happening to us, don’t you? Una asks Marko as they get more and more embroiled with Franz and killing displaces fucking as the focus of the show. He’s impotent by then, no longer desiring sex. They’re being coerced by money onto a death spiral, which does drag down most of the Gang. It’s not until Marko comes out the other side that his libido is restored, along with a real passion to kill the death-dealing money men whose patrons are the undead wealthy audience who pay people to live — and especially to die — for their entertainment. I think you’re right, satire: the Westerners in this movie can neither live nor die for themselves, but can only pay and watch others do it.
Una didn’t think the father of that family deserved to die because he hadn’t committed any sin, the implication being that the other snuff victims had and that the Gang was meting out justice in a way.
In an interview Djordjevic said that his characters were not ”fit” to live in this world and that he therefore helped them, relieved them of suffering. I think Marko over time grows this narcissistic illusion (which he throws back at Una – he says ”you are not God to judge who has sin”) that he is some kind of a Demiurge, which is reinforced when at the Orthodox monastery he tells the priest that when he thinks about his faith,he only sees his own reflection. But do you think he could be seen as Christ – in his student movie, I had that impression – undergoing a trajectory similar to Kazantsakis’s ”Last Temptation”?
I was talking about the theater where Una appears in an episodic role as the girl who heals the soldier after the battle. This is right before she meets Marko at the party afterwards. (”Marko” is also the name of the famous warrior in Kosovo, the Kraljevic Marko – but this reference will escape most non-native viewers) Here is a link to the paradigmatic painting:
The gender politics is extremely complex. Although the anarcho-socialist narrative conjures up some kind of Western queer liberationism (hence also the ”trash aesthetics” of John Waters) I think it’s clear that Djordjevic doesn’t one-sidedly endorse this any more than he endorses patriarchalism. I found it understandably painful, for example, to watch the hiv-positive top seduce the tranny, and it certainly wasn’t nice when the tall guy (who decides to stay with the church) left the chubby girl. But more widely, although the Phallus is clearly being called to the stand, it is also true that Mother Earth has become infertile, and that female nurturing is sorely lacking everywhere.
But the would-be snuff victim is in despair: he had reconciled himself to his death, had made a deal to save his family financially, etc. The whole story is repeatedly ambivalent.
Yes ambivalence is interesting, he never moralizes, or takes sides, good and bad light and darkness mud and pink are always mixed. That live show drawns on a folk custom called ”lapot”
which by the way still exists in hilly Montenegro. Sometimes, as in the movie, bread or corn is placed on the head of the elderly target, making it seem as though it is bread and not me who is killing you. This might be the key to interpreting the Orthodoxy, for with this act one is also symbolically rid of ”sin” and ”guilt”, which is attributed to the corrupted Mother Earth through the bread.
Off-topic: the Narcissistic Cat has now reconciled herself with the splitting inherent in Lacanian love, and has blissfully embraced the allure of frigid yet sensuous objects; her feline enthousiasm about these Diagrams of Love is enormously entertaining, and she is certainly the more flamboyant part of the lesbian couple, erm, fraternity. Once I establish a safe working environment I will add a very special twist to the last episode of the Objects, in which as you remember we were about to see what happens when the Temptess and the Cat are placed in a teleportation system.
As far as I know, no physicists are currently studying the fourfold divide of objects, the forces causing these splits, or the nature and source of object-allure. It makes for ontological and psychological consistency for Levi to regard Lacan’s split subject as an extension of a universal splitting taking place inside every object. Graham’s fourfold looks to me like it’s been inspired by Lacan: his division between the sensual object and the real object corresponds directly to Lacan’s distinction between the Imaginary and the Real, while the split between qualities and essence corresponds to the distinction between the Symbolic and the Real. Once Levi converts Graham’s 2 by 2 table into a Lacanian 3-fold with Borromean overlaps, he will have achieved full integration.
Definitely Marko is a Jesus figure. This ties the story to the flagellant processions, and also to Orthodox iconography. The priest gives Marko an icon of the patron saint of travelers, and at the end Marko tells Una that the two of them are eternal travelers. Marko iconically participates with the eternal travelers of Christianity, paradigmatic among whom was Jesus, whose redemptive praxis was a wandering one, accompanied by his disciples, a demiurgic wanderer among men.
The snuff cabaret described the lapot legend to the decadent American audience, but I had no idea that there was some truth to this practice of killing the elderly. I was going to put up a screengrab of the villagers, who are portrayed with rare exception as ugly, crude, and violent in this film. This is another divide: the sophisticated decadence of the Belgrade urban performers with the hicks from the sticks who are their audience and pursuers.
This is another divide: the sophisticated decadence of the Belgrade urban performers with the hicks from the sticks who are their audience and pursuers.
I would say that this portrayal is pretty much accurate, although I also applaud the film for not being… simplistic. For example, there is a marvellous parallel drawn between e.g. the abuse that the tranny Ceca suffers from her father, and the abuse Marko suffers in Belgrade (his father doesn’t want to give any of his big cash for the movies) and you could also say I think that the porno gang meets their equivalent in all of the snuff victims, who are equally despondent and abused.
There is also tremendous humor in all this which I’m not sure comes across linguistically. For example, when Ceca gives her poignant speech about her early sex life, one of the villagers stands up and shouts ”Come to grand-daddy so I can stretch your ass” and you can’t help but laugh even as you’re confronted with the abjection of his snide remarks; to which Ceca, instead of launching into some female empowerment antic like Lady Gaga, immediately sucks the horse’s cock.
That line worked fine for me — globally funny. A lot of this movie was funny and ridiculous, but only when it intended to be. I got absorbed into the whole project, a very effective working through of the idea.
Once Levi converts Graham’s 2 by 2 table into a Lacanian 3-fold with Borromean overlaps, he will have achieved full integration.
We have yet to reach the dramatic climax of the cabaret, though, for at the moment the Narcissistic Cat is still working in her Mentor’s shadow. What if somehwere along the way she discovers something brilliant OF HER OWN, and then the Tempress shows her teeth (so far she’s been snarling in low key at Shaviro, but Shaviro isn’t really a disciple). Then we will see whether the flat ontology has truly collapsed the Phallus.
There are some hard-to-translate parts. For example, you say ”do jaja” in Serbian, which literally means ”to the balls”, when you want to express delight. When in the climactic snuff scene, with the bearded druggie decapitating the village psycho Leatherface-style, Marko exclaims ”Do jaja!”, by referring to sex, the expression suggests that at this point the sex and the death have melded into the death drive, that he experiences this decapitation as sex.
Also I didn’t translate the recurrent cuss ”I will fuck your mother” – typical for Serbian – which keeps referring us back to the gang’s central act, and the unsuccessful fertilization of Mother Earth.
I’m sure it’s impossible to capture some of these culture-specific nuances. Your subtitles were clear and well-placed in the film, very professionally done.
Last night I saw Hot Tub Time Machine, which believe it or not I recommend especially for the frenetic, almost chaotic pacing. To your second point though, there’s a scene where the 20-year-old nerd is watching his uncle’s wacky friend having sex with his slutty mother. “Motherfucker!” yells the 20-year-old — an immature joke to be sure, but I got a kick out of it.
There’s another thought that’s been obsessing me – the last scene, the razor, the cut. I thought again of Peretz’s book, and of the elevator scene in Dressed to Kill, which I think is a similar scene. What do you think?
From Oedipus’s blindness – the essential tragic image that shows the discovery of the image to be the discovery of one as doomed and trapped in a destiny to which one is blind – to the nightmarish visions of the double in ETA Hoffmann or EA Poe and the fatal visions of the doomed heroes and heroines of film noir, the discovery of the dimension of the image was often understood by art as revealing the dimension of man’s fate to which man is blind. Yet FEMME FATALE shows that we need to liberate ourselves from this understanding of the image as an announcement of a destiny. We need to liberate ourselves for a dimension of futurity without content, specifically the content that the concept of destiny gave it, which is a defense against the blank and blinding nothingness insicribed in the image. We need to liberate from the view of fate and fatality inscribed in the image understood as a femme fatale, as a double-crossing creature exposing us to our own blindness. The Image blinds, but it is not a blinding that shows our entrapment in a destiny, but a blindness activating the possibility of a new, visionary power, and of a new life.
Does the cut open to a new and undestined life in Porno Gang? The hero speaks of the two of them being eternal travelers, which seems to betoken an afterlife more in keeping with the old-school eternal visionary that Peretz believes DePalma has left behind. But if we regard this final cut as a passing-beyond of ordinary cinematic constraints into some new life, then maybe the undestined is what’s being signaled here. What other ending would have made this point clearer, after the hero had killed off the porno boss and the snuff producer? As it stands, the end does seem either nihilistic or redemptive in a Jesus’ self-sacrificial sense.
What I’m thinking is that for the story to be redemptive, the Porno Gang would need to have a transcendent goal, some kind of an idealism; but they don’t. Their rebellion is motivated by ”pushing boundaries” but it’s really just motivated by Marko’s artistic narcissism. Even the last victim is not saved because the Porno Gang wants to save him, but by the deus ex machina. So I’m thinking about this lack of content, this total flatness, this is what resonates in Peretz’s quote.
From your Peretz quote: “We need to liberate ourselves for a dimension of futurity without content, specifically the content that the concept of destiny gave it, which is a defense against the blank and blinding nothingness insicribed in the image… The Image blinds, but it is not a blinding that shows our entrapment in a destiny, but a blindness activating the possibility of a new, visionary power, and of a new life.
So what vision does the flat blindness of Porno Gang show, what new life? The characters are dead, they’re talking about becoming eternal travelers. For Jesus the cuts were redemptive: even if God forsakes him on the cross, the Bible assures the believers that by his wounds we are healed. Have you ever seen Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross? Here’s a sort of animated presentation of these 14 gigantic modernist paintings, each of which thematizes the blindness and the cut. Does Marko show the end of the narcissistic vision? What then? Has he saved us, the viewers, from making the same mistake, so that by his wounds we are healed from ourselves? How is the flatness, sliced through the wrists, anything but an image of “nihil unbound”?
Things are different in De Palma: there you have the Light, which Peretz uses as a basis of his discussion. But in light of Shaviro’s new article, Djordjevic is more about intensities and cuts. The film seems to operate on a kind of a permanent RUSH, for want of a better word. It’s not especially fast, it’s more like it behaves in a wild, intense way which seems to suggest a permanent ”living in the moment”. There is a special, palpable quality to its Affect. But my point is that there is no motivation, and hence no redemption, in the events depicted. The porno gang doesn’t go on a trip to fight for the Truth, the socialistic-anarchist connotation is just a side effect, and they don’t spare the Lapot victim out of moral conviction – rather, because police came at the last moment. This is where the ”futurity without content” comes in. Inside this very emptiness, and meaninglessness,blakness, or seeming nihilism, comes the attempt to reclaim life through death, and ironically the whole dead porno gang is more alive than their German audiences. (The futurity I think refers to how everything, from scene 1 of Marko’s student film, is a foreshadowing or a refraction of this initial and/or final event, Jesus’s self-mutilation before the crying pig, therefore a kind of a future perfect tense)
As one of the commenters on Youtube remarked, it looks like you can’t pick any of that Newman up if you don’t see it in the museum, despite the gorgeous Mozart
I thought it was a long time ago you wrote this up. Dejan sent me a copy of it yesterday, but I’m not particularly interested in taking the time to watch this, as there was a certain amount of physical discomfort involved in watching ‘serbian film’, but that’s enough. I’d be interested to know if they are similar–I frankly just don’t care that much about how the ‘society causes’ all this and they’re ‘interwoven’ since, of course, they have been since Warhol’s ‘Flesh’ and ‘Lonesome Cowboys’ and ‘Heat’ ushered in the Golden Age of Hardcore Porno. Admittedly, ‘Serbian Film’ is very good, but it’s not like you need to keep thinking about it.
They are complementary, but the Porno Gang is in a totally different key (equally brilliant if not more, as it mixes genres with more elasticity than the Serbian Film)
I agree with pc’s summary. Porno Gang is more nuanced than Serbian Film, which I suppose could be said for 99.9999% of all films. I liked this one too, as you can see from the comments.
Patrick if you’re watching there’s a segment of maybe 2 minutes, after the first snuff murder, without translation (I translated the film, which was a very rush job so I overlooked this one). Don’t panic, because the translation returns after 2 minutes.
Eloise did you read the Serbian theorist’s analysis I sent, it’s really good, and it touches upon the Gnostic aspect. I don’t have time tonight to translate the other 20 pages but there’s a ton of interesting stuff about theological interpretation, Russian formalism, Kojeve, Derrida, plus a taste of Nikolai Berdzajev, the Russian philosopher I mentioned before who is totally unknown in the West.
Thanks for sending me that piece and for doing the translation, pc. Yes I read it, found it intriguing. The theorist acts as if Serbian Film were some sort of apocalypse without resurrection, which is a bit hyperbolic for my tastes, but I will get back to the piece you translated and interact with it.
More specifically I think he´s saying that the Gnostic perspective would be the one without Resurrection (same thing I noticed myself), because matter is bad, but I am under the impression that in THE PORNO GANG the New Testament comes back and in this sense it goes beyond Gnosticism, BACK INTO THE MATTER. This movement is now endlessly intriguing, the rabbit is there.
´´Akshions do have konsequenses, and yet, there is the MAGICK“
I loved how Bitchness – whose BITCH SWITCH is now turned to -1 because she found another reason to blame me for keeping Lafayette employed – emphasized the upset of her stomach while watching the SF. I don´t believe for a second that she had any bodily discomfort, only an iron hard erection, especially in those scenes where you see Milosh´s dick dangling.
no, not mon estomac, and I didn’t even say so, but rather the chair I had to use. It was, however, worth the whole thing, because I have a DVD player at my worthy and expense-free disposal, although I will not be discussing ‘Porno Gang’ with you.
“but I am under the impression that in THE PORNO GANG the New Testament comes back and in this sense it goes beyond Gnosticism, BACK INTO THE MATTER. This movement is now endlessly intriguing, the rabbit is there.”
How thoughtful and you talk about that stupid rabbit again. Who needs such a silly esoteric analysis? Serbian Film didn’t need it, and you were just as unfocussed as your ‘wyrmyrn’ until I watched it. In this way, you continue your unhallowed existence, ‘married’ to lafayetc, who is happy to honour your idiocy in wanting a ‘cyber-marriage’ that you can turn into a bank account for yourself!
Well certainly not YOU, you’re a vampire and in this sense secure in the knowledge that you’ll always be able to fuck. Us mere mortals have to think about what happens with our asses post mortem.
Still I think you can enjoy the Gang on other levels; there are things in it like the anal baptism scene in SF, e.g. horsesucking with Ceca the tranny, but let me not spoil the fun.
As I said, I’ll get back to the essay later, but meanwhile I gave you my initial gnostic reading of Porno Gang: it’s gnostic in the sense of salvation coming after death in some ideal state. It’s accelerationist: if matter is the corruption that keeps you from blessedness, but if we’re all material beings on earth, then immerse yourself in that corruption in order to hasten the day of transcendence. I see no return to matter, nor any material redemption, at the end of that film. Serbian Film too is accelerationist, but doesn’t transcend or redeem matter.
Serbian Film too is accelerationist, but doesn’t transcend or redeem matter.
Ah, I see now, since I hate Dejan and lafayetc with all my heart, I wished that I could deny the greatness of ‘Serbian Film’, but alas, I cannot.
But ‘Porno Gang’ clearly wasn’t intelligent enough to realize that a film should never point toward redemption, but only annihilation and total hopelessness, horror and desolation (if they start out with this sort of thing; I can still use the DVD player for Babs concerts, you know…) With ‘Serbian Film’ you just have to go on with the work after it’s over, and you can do it like Milos, or choose the other ‘alternative ending’ I spoke of.
Dominic has an interesting new post about frustration, how it is valueless in itself, but in feeling it all the way you can then be fully absorbed (although necessarily, he would want to proclaim ‘joy in non-enjoyment’, when frankly, just going all the way through the frustration allows a release, quite often followed by action to ‘repair’–and in cases where the desired ‘repair’ isn’t going to happen, some kind of peace might be achieved. This isn’t exactly what he says, but it’s my deterritorialization of his post, which I mustn’t touch a ce moment, because he put ‘unpleasure’ in there, so I’d let other folks join in and share….so therefore ‘Serbian Film’ is all frustration, it makes you feel the Whole Enchilada, and in this way, you are purged–much like the real director, who is obviously a sadist, unlike the in-house director, who ‘suffers for her art’, behaving like some Tarantino hag on the floor.
Fuck, my whole point is this is again like the points I was making a good while back about Racine not ‘talking about God’ in his plays, and Martha Graham not ‘talking about universal brotherhood’ in her dances–they are best left found where they may or may not be, in the non-material, which is NOT on-film, in-play, or in-dance. These, when tragic, can map out the horror of life, and should leave it horrible, although skillfully, or it will just be more schlock, and we can’t have that, can we? and then you can go to ‘heaven’ if it’s there to go to, or just be ‘remembered and cherished by family and friends’, etc. In this way, ‘Serbian Film’ goes all the way with hell, which is what we should be concerned with, just like Racine and Graham do, and if there’s heaven, it will take care of itself.
But ‘Porno Gang’ clearly wasn’t intelligent enough to realize that a film should never point toward redemption, but only annihilation and total hopelessness, horror and desolation
God apparently you´re choking on your own unproductive bile at the moment because it was YOU who noticed in the Serbian Film that the annihilation and the hopelessness are life-affirming, which paradox is the whole subject of the conversation. Now you´re harping on some pedestrian adolescent rage related to your bimboid love affair with the hyperstitionists.
Must I suffer this after I was forced to think about DOT PALIN during Piranja 3D, her enraged face spoiling every decent cockshot of which there were plenty in this failed mysoginistic masterpiece.
Return to matter consists in the fact that the characters discover in the flesh, in everyday life, not a source of transcendence (towards the Gnostic ”higher spiritual realm”), but the possibility of forgiveness, of an unselfish act, which you see in the Lapot episode.
Yes I see that. Killing off the demiurgic producer was a victory of spirit over flesh accomplished within the realm of the flesh, snuffing out the Snuffmaster if you will.
In Proust for Dummies I found out that Virginia Woolf, upon reading just some of Swann’s Way, was paralyzed by writerly inadequacy. I can never write that well, so why bother? was her attitude for years. She finally had to quit reading Proust in order to get on with her own writing. She still killed herself of course, but at least she got a few satisfying things done before taking the plunge. Continually watching/reading and evaluating others’ creative work can sometimes accelerate, sometimes hinder the creative urge. Okay, Porno Gang and Serbian Film are already in the can; good for them: now I must go my own way without comparing and contrasting and trying to outdo what’s already been done. (I’m sure Harman has already told us this tip many times.)
Not sure I follow. I was exaggerating: Just because ‘Porno Gang’ is not likely as Olympian as ‘Serbian Film’ doesn’t, of course, mean it’s not worthy in many ways. But something that goes all the way, like the 9th Symphony of Beethoven, is still always going to be more monumental than Poulenc Flute Sonatas or Chabrier songs or god knows that one that everybody loves from ‘Les Six’, I love it I can’t remember her name right now. But all of it has its place, you know.
Virginia Woolf is a bad example of that, though, because she was a great writer by any standards, and just suffered severe clinical depression (I don’t know the details–and there is certainly nothing in ‘The Hours’ that enlightens you on ay of it— but ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ is a gorgeous book.)
So who’s that French composer that everybody just loves to get all cheap-melancholy about? It’s so tiresome, that stuff, when you get a lot more sense of loss-pleasure from Ravel. It’ll come to me in a minute.
I didn’t mean you shouldn’t discuss these 2 films. I meant that Serbian Film doesn’t have to talk about salvation–it’s butcher than that: It lets you figure out that maybe you wouldn’t want to do that personally, that it wouldn’t really be all that great to be ‘like a character in a great film’.
“YOU who noticed in the Serbian Film that the annihilation and the hopelessness are life-affirming, which paradox is the whole subject of the conversation.”
NO! It was life-affirming because it doesn’t have to spell it out. On the surface, it’s not life-affirming at all, you have to have really been around the block like I have, to explain it to wyrmyrn who ‘can’t find where their cunts are located’, to quote your evil mind.
“Now you´re harping on some pedestrian adolescent rage related to your bimboid love affair with the hyperstitionists.”
That you will never be able to understand, that there is real pain involved, and I’d just as soon do without it. You can call it ‘paranoia’, but that’s not what it is. ‘lafayetc’, and therefore you, have not earned my good company.
so therefore ‘Serbian Film’ is all frustration, it makes you feel the Whole Enchilada, and in this way, you are purged
Well exactly, the film as film, in content and performance, is of course nothing pure or edifying, but what it does to the viewer, is. It performs a damn good fleet entema on the viewer.
Eloise why are you constantly battling with the anal censor in your head and fretting pointlessly about ”to do art or not to do art” and being unable to make up your mind between analysis and creation like Richard Dreyfuss in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. If you want to do art, just do art.
That you will never be able to understand, that there is real pain involved, and I’d just as soon do without it.
Whether I understand or not, fact is I can only be your PUSSY POSTMAN in this scenario. I mediate your angels and demons. Otherwise I might as well be dead. When I send you a laxative movie to ease your pain, you instantly start BITCHING. No doubt the same would happen if I sent a goddamn helicopter to take you to a Tahiti vacation with countless boyz at the ready. You’re just horrible, admit it.
And you’re upsetting Elosie, can’t you see SHE’S CRYING???
No doubt the same would happen if I sent a goddamn helicopter to take you to a Tahiti vacation with countless boyz at the ready.
A helicopter can’t fly over that kind of ocean, but I promise I wouldn’t complain if you sent even a reasonable aircraft, rilly I wouldn’t.
I hadn’t noticed Eloise ‘crying’. What are you talking about? He just didn’t know what I meant about ‘Serbian Film’, Racine, and Graham (or that’s what I gathered–Va. Woolf thought she was inferior to Proust, but that’s not quite right, it’s just she thought it. On the other hand, Fannie Hurst is a good example, she’s definitely inferior to Proust.)
I mediate your angels and demons. Otherwise I might as well be dead.
No, that’s not true. The problem is basically with ‘lafayetc’, who thinks she has some ‘right to her anonymity’, but she doesn’t. We’ve been through a lot over there, and it never bothered her, but it does bother me. So when she talks to me in emails to come back there, she is IMMEDIATELY HORRIBLE the minute I write the first posts, screaming PATRICK! I deleted that email account!
So, if I’m ‘horrible’, that’s beside the point, you let lafayetc get away with beastliness, because of your fear of abandonment (which you know she won’t do to you, but that I will if I’m treated like shit, and I was for a fucking long time. You’re just trying to act like a pitiful wermin.)
I didn’t mean you shouldn’t discuss these 2 films. I meant that Serbian Film doesn’t have to talk about salvation–it’s butcher than that: It lets you figure out that maybe you wouldn’t want to do that personally, that it wouldn’t really be all that great to be ‘like a character in a great film’.
You’re copping out of the main question which is are you ready to spend your vampiric eternity with or without a permanent hard-on ??? ARE YOU A TOP OR ARE YOU A WUSS??? This is about immortality, not death.
If you knew any history other than that time Tara fell to the Yanks you’d know that Serbs have always been at the forefront of revolutionary change – from Nikola Tesla to Gavrilo Princip – and are now spearheding the cinematic New Wave. Stuff like Porno Banda hasn’t been seen since Truffaut and Godard at least.
Eloise take some tea, vitamins, buy some flowers for the wife, get some rest and stop tormenting yourself with other-worldly ambitions. Start from the small, such as trying to write at least a paragraph a day without much thinking where it will take you, instead of dooming yourself to failure with self-defeating thoughts. If they come, buy a dildo for Christ’s sakes and start practising in the bathtub.
“You’re copping out of the main question which is are you ready to spend your vampiric eternity with or without a permanent hard-on ??? ARE YOU A TOP OR ARE YOU A WUSS??? This is about immortality, not death. ”
As a confirmed bottom, you should know that you don’t determine as much as you think you do in your inverted way–which IS, to still the ‘magic penis’ from the big black mosquito-slapping cock, just like Arpege has described Zizek.
I’m not trying to be a ‘top’ to impress you. I’m whatever I feel like doing, but you do sound stoned. Both what you say to me and John this morning sounds quite demented, and a temporary drug state.
Your ridiculous talk about the Serbs and their superiority to literally everyone else is quite the turn-off, and I really think one Serbian film about fucking is enough. You should have sent this one to ‘lafayetc’, after all, you claim to know her real name because she wanted you to send her dvd’s. I’m sure that’s not true–she knows that I know that your number is really coarse and crude by now. The very idea you’d think I’d want to ‘prove myself’ to ‘have a permanent hard-on’. It’s not even a desirable goal by any means. But your Serb talk is very dull-edged by now.
Don’t know why John even puts up with it. Although I don’t think he’s upset. Jonathan Franzen’s new book ‘Freedom’ really does sound good, although the writer is very bratty in some of the things he wrote in one memoir a few years ago. Frank Rich wrote enough and well-enough about it in the Sunday paper, that I should read it. I just finished someone’s memoir, and possibly my ‘fan’ found out who that was, okay, that’s fine, he’s cute enough, I daresay–this memoir was much better-written than I would have expected, but I can’t talk about it at this point, as it’s related to the ‘secret movie’ that I mentioned (and which still has to remain secret.) Don’t you see how absurd it is to talk about ‘permanent hard-ons’ and ‘Eloise is CRYING’ on the computer? On your own blog, you tell lafayette, I ‘really don’t need Muffinz’s services any more’, so why don’t you just shut up, because you’re not going to get them under these appalling circumstances–circumstances in which you want to join once again with lafayette to inflict Serbian-Mladic style torture on me, and of course we all know that your bullshit about the Serbs’ innocence in literally all war crimes is just that, and we DON’T want to hear it. It’s like leninino and Arpege when they don’t want to hear about the recent stonings of ‘convicted adulterers and fornicators’ in Afghanistan, but just go ahead and blame the U.S. for things it didn’t even do (although Obama does seem to be weakening.)
Arpege wouldn’t post this, because she would say that both this and 9/11 were ‘not important’ compared to the general unpopularity of the proposed mosque near the World Trade Center–because she and leninino and Jodi as well would all see this as ‘systemic racism’ (which they now apply to Muslims as well as blacks, although she’s got tons of Jim Crow posts there too right now). This is typical, of course, but your position is little better, and it’s disgusting to see you trying to convince me to ‘prove myself’ to such as you and ‘lafayetc’ on a mere blog.
John, Krugman is very good today: This is the best example of seen of someone really trying to make it simple enough for even the stupid to look just one step beyond the knee-jerk obvious, in regard to spending and austerity. Just ‘a little intellectual clarity’, that’s something I’ve written about as nearly impossible: It always takes something of a ‘Step 2’, and whole populations tend to shy away from that, whether it’s supporting the Tea Party types, or those who oppose the mosque, not realizing that American moderate Muslims are not dangerous, and in fact, make America seem as stupidly primitive as fundamental Islam of the Bin Laden sort. However, I just saw that there is a new $50 billion stimulus for transportation which should create jobs–the public is now without faith in the matter of unemployment, and in this way, the Republicans and Tea Partyers could come to power, cheered on by the likes of Jodi and Arpege, who always seem to prefer the overtly bad to the moderately bad (see Arpege’s idiot Squirrel cartoon, as if her Marxism had anything to offer most of the time except proclaiming how wonderful it is and how Wendy Brown is a ‘seriously bad person’ and Nina Power ‘utters a Zizekism in a little-girl voice’. It’s okay, but it’s just talk.)
I god damn AM going to be a Serbian nationalist if it means defending sublime cinema. WHO in the world at the moment has such movies – name them, and I’ll fuck Satan’s ass in penance for my nationalism.
It’s quite another thing that the Serbian Film woke up the horny Dick Cheney goat sleeping in your Abama ™ polyesther fur coat, darling, so you can’t accept just to what edge of extremity it pushed you within just an hour or two of its running time. You were feeling pre-cum in your THROAT before you messed up that DVD player with a sea of sperm that could have borne Aphrodite, and you rewound Milos’s brother more times than Cher can remember changing goddamn WIGS. You don´t need any label on that DVD cause the semen encrusted the words ´´SERBIAN FILM´´ on it.
Now you´re ashamed of yourself, so you have to tell Eloise, suddenly, all about how ultimately you do support ABAMA and it´s those goddamn SERBS who are primitive rapists, not YOU, not that refined and humble pianist with a taste for Resnais.
Maybe Arpege likes this because it makes her feel more socialist to have a retarded right-wing brother from Manhat´n. But I know you better than she, Satan´s filthy whore!
Esp. since you wrote me an email oozing with thrillment about his most recent cinematic excursion, and said you were going to send me that dvd too. Well, save it, ‘Coeurs’ was a big bore and even Christian, super-bourgeois Swiss life-style, said ‘don’t take it too seriously’. I do remember that one of your freaks at CPC went on and on about this senile product, which has ‘Paris snowfalls’ as a recurring motif–a weird notion, that, since it comes across as if a cliche, and then you remember that ‘Paris snow’ isn’t really a cliche at all as in ‘I love Paris in the Springtime’, etc.
John, I may watch ‘Porno Gang’ at some point, I’m just in no rush to watch and endlessly analyze these Serbian films as if that was the only important thing in the world. I’ve got to go catch that filming of Martha Stewart’s show later this week, that will be inspiring, because she does 5, maybe 7, a week, and that means it will all be this super-professional process you’re seeing, and that’s always got its own hotness, like when I saw Rosemary Clooney at the Blue Note in 1987. Oh MAN, I had a bit too much red wine today, it was very ‘soft’, just as the guy at Willie’s told Jack, and went down a little too easy. I was annoyed that the fresh sage I got was bitter, so I had to strain the sauce I made for it, and get the solid parts out, as they tasted like chewing on some sort of weeds.
“It’s quite another thing that the Serbian Film woke up the horny Dick Cheney goat sleeping in your Abama ™ polyesther fur coat, darling, so you can’t accept just to what edge of extremity it pushed you within just an hour or two of its running time. You were feeling pre-cum in your THROAT before you messed up that DVD player with a sea of sperm that could have borne Aphrodite, and you rewound Milos’s brother more times than Cher can remember changing goddamn WIGS. You don´t need any label on that DVD cause the semen encrusted the words ´´SERBIAN FILM´´ on it.”
You wonder if he means this sort of thing at all, since anybody knows I’d say I’d jerked off to a movie if I had, or if it had given me a hard-on. Just because I thought it was a great film and sexy doesn’t mean I thought it was something to jerk off to, and I didn’t. Once was enough. I should have known that this kind of reaction would have been predictable, so no, I won’t be watching the other film any time soon, as I am bored with this hyperbole. A great film is a great film, but I have no interest in talking to someone drunk on it. I have definitely seen greater films, but I won’t name them, because I do NOT get jouissance from this shit-arguing when the point has been made and it’s time for the drunks to be sent home. The problem, of course, is that I won’t take the blog seriously anymore, and once ensconced and immediately insulted by her partner and ‘top’, lafayetc, I had the largesse to write for a week and maybe more, that’s certainly more than was deserved in that hole. Has nothing whatever to do with Hyperstition, even if it used to–if your shit-ass there won’t identify herself, I have nothing to say. Period. End of report. I just am not interested to fulfill bleugers’ longings for a line from me to prove that I’m ‘stuck in the net’. Yes, I was, and from that, I got a book, but that’s not why I did that: I was naive, and that’s why I’m missed in the uncivilized bleugs (which is most of them), because I’d let myself be played with and imagine I was enjoying it. After awhile, it was obviously nowhere, and maybe, just maybe, Dejan can understand that that’s why somebody stops something so stupid. It was stupid enough that I did it as long as I did. But more? Forget it? Some rude creep like ‘lafayetc’ deserves you, and you alone. Be happy, he’s very faithful.
Obama’s first pile of infrastructure stimulus was spent less on roads and bridges in serious need of repair and more on minor upgrades in local politicians’ favorite districts. It would be a significant improvement if this new batch of money could be more carefully earmarked. But overall I say good for Obama in trying to juice up the public works projects. Your father was a paving contractor, was he not?
The point about Virginia Woolf was tangentially relevant to the point at hand, but more importantly it was something I had just read which I found worth reporting. It’s certainly possible that Woolf was already blocked before she read a word of Proust. The Proust for Dummies focused less on the novel and more on Marcel’s correspondences and friendships — interesting enough, but the Dear Abby tone to de Botton’s book is cloying if not entirely degueulasse.
I’ve been feeling better today, though as is usually the case I find myself relapsing a bit as the day wears on. I’m not quite ready for further forays into Serbian cinematic gnosticisms, but they do interest me and so I shall return to them.
“being unable to make up your mind between analysis and creation”
You’ve probably noticed that, although I don’t often go in for freestanding cultural product interpretation, I do enjoy analytical discussions if someone else wants to get the ball rolling. You’re usually stimulating in this regard, pc, if at times prone to obsessive absorption in certain themes. Of course these obsessions contribute to your distinct interlocutionary charm, even if they do sometimes weary or irritate me. I suppose Lacan would say that the wearying irritation is also part of the jouissance I derive from these conversations: I guess he was a glass-half-full kind of guy.
/’I suppose Lacan would say that the wearying irritation is also part of the jouissance I derive from these conversations: I guess he was a glass-half-full kind of guy.’
Oh, he wouldn’t like that, now would he? I hadn’t thought of that myself, given that he’s always ready for some new slaughter which passes as ‘going all the way’. He was clearly a masochist himself–certainly hadn’t thought of that till now either, and none too soon.
because I do NOT get jouissance from this shit-arguing when the point has been made and it’s time for the drunks to be sent home.
I didn’t even START arguing, you bitch troll from Hell. You talked about the film and then the next day you started pulling at my eyes again about Lafayette, completely without reason and rhyme. With Eloise I had a separate discussion about the Gnosticism, but then you want to pull me apart on THAT ONE as well because YOU think the discussion is not worth having and you prefer to discuss chicken biscuits dipped in testicle tjap tjoy in between snippets from the New York Times. But since you brought it up again, I stand behind my words that Western cinema doesn’t have anything even remotely similar to this to offer at the moment, surely a consequence of the fact that the imperial core is so full of shit they’ve imported from the colonies that they’re now completely devoid of content and gagging on their pointless greed. Precisely the way both Serbian films depict the Empire, as a bunch of impotent voyeurs. But no you don’t have to watch, I just won’t send any more DVDs. Then you can have more time for smearing French champignon pate on the butts of the Albanian rent boyz you’ll be brutalizing down at the COCKRING club.
Thanks NB, there’s almost nothing in the review (he did get the main point that the film serves as a kind of a litmus paper for British Puritans) and he makes some material mistakes, like the idea that Milosh is in poverty – he isn’t, but as one character puts it his reserves will wear off in the long run (like all our reservers in neoliberal capitalism) – and besides the most important aspect to the story is that he DOESN’T do it for the money, but for the thrill. Besides in the by now tedious discussion of the baby fucking he forgets to mention that the baby fucking isn’t at all new in cinema history, it has a long tradition in B-horror for example. Grade B- but exemplary though that he’s defending the film as a work of art, which it is.
Uh, I never saw a B-movie with baby fucking. But there you go. Is there some subgenre I don’t know about? I remember some babes being thrown into the fire by Satan in Haxan…
I still haven’t seen it yet, but I have downloaded it. Just haven’t had time yet. I had understood that Milos did do it for financial security, as far as the plot point goes (I’m sure there are stronger thematic reasons). Security being the operative word. He’s not poor, but neither is he totally secure (something that everyone lusts after in our super-capitalist world. Have you bought your EuroMillions lotto ticket yet?). Does the director seem to come from a different class, as the reviewer says? I mean, he’s certainly a visionary, a bit of a Napoleon, or Mengele.
It seems this guy just put the review together not long after seeing the film, so I think it’s a pretty good effort at analysis/defence, especially on YouTube so far. Maybe not more than B-, but it’s a first stab. Also, his concentration on the child/baby thing seems close to his heart because this is probably one of the major reasons Serbian Film will be massively censored here. I mean, I think he’s probably right that it’s not actually as visually explicit as other films that get passed with no or very few cuts. He wants to say that this film is more than just baby fucking, but he has to talk about it (to the English, I guess) to do so. He seems pretty pissed off by censorship generally because I also noticed today that he’s done loads of reviews on video nasties. There were a lot of crap films that were designated nasties in the UK but there were also some gems that just got lumped in (not that any of them should have been banned anyway). In fact, I think Salo was banned here under the scare.
Well, save it, ‘Coeurs’ was a big bore and even Christian, super-bourgeois Swiss life-style, said ‘don’t take it too seriously’.
I haven’t seen ‘Coeurs’ but this one is a return to the style of ‘Marienbad’ you could even see it as a sequel of sorts, and it’s phenomenal. But I’m not going to send it because you don’t have time, you have to make chicken breast biscuits for Childie.
Security being the operative word. He’s not poor, but neither is he totally secure (something that everyone lusts after in our super-capitalist world. Have you bought your EuroMillions lotto ticket yet?). Does the director seem to come from a different class, as the reviewer says? I mean, he’s certainly a visionary, a bit of a Napoleon, or Mengele.
Yes he does it ostensibly to make his family secure, because his reserves will wear off, but down the line you realize he does it, as the director puts it, because he liked ”that time he got sucked off by a mongoloid through a glory hole he made in the microwave owen”, which is a kind of a blackly-humorous clue to the relentless Lacanian Drive or Deleuzian affect which drives Milosh, and the whole film, towards its curiously life-affirming attitude (and I just hate to admit that only Bitchness understood this point of all the people who have so far discussed the film on the net).
The whole world of underground elite snuff being depicted doesn’t exist in Serbia, and we also don’t have such affluent maffia (unlike the Ruskies). The scene is deliberately modelled after Western movies in order to be more accessible to this market, but more importantly, because this is a way of saying that foreign Capital is pulling the strings.
As for the director, I sent the article of a Serbian cultural theorist about the film, and he made a number of convincing points about him as the Demiurge in a Gnostic conspiracy plot. But I don’t think we can talk about this until you have seen the film.
Anti-baby violence has a long tradition on screen, from the scene of the Black Sabbath in the classic HAXAN WITCH by B. Christensen (1922) across baby slaughter for Satanic purposes by Christopher Lee in TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER (1975) to the zombie babies being kicked around left to right in Pete Jackson’s BRAINDEAD (1995) and countless other Troma-style direct-to-DVD horrors (e.g. FEAST 2) which truthfully deploy this for splatter-camp purposes (…) but whether gag or socially meaningful, baby is by no means a protected species in film.
Well, I’ve seen all these films, apart from Feast 2, and in none of them are babies fucked to death. I think the reviewer is glossing just a bit. Braindead is indeed hilarious in its abuse of the zombie child. And that babe certainly ain’t innocent. (Ah, if only they could take all the money away from Peter Jackson, he might start making decent films again.) There are plenty of Spielberg films in which children are put into jeopardy. There were quite a few baby death jokes in the playground when I was a kid (something to do with a food mixer, I seem to remember). But it’s not the violence, it’s the sex. We’re not British puritans for nothing, you know!
It’s funny, because I always saw Lacan as a kind of Gnostic demiurge. All that misfiring. A-ha!
“If it turns out that there IS a God, I don’t think that He’s evil. I think that the worst you can say about Him is that basically He’s an underachiever.”
It’s the same “curiously life-affirming attitude” we see in zombie movies: mindless insatiable cannibalistic drive.
Well, no; I’m talking about the anger that spills out of every pore of SF, anger at the systematic rape of Serbia, and places like Serbia, which then results in the kind of ripples as the recent banning at the British festival. This is not something that happens on the level of the film’s gruesome content, but what the film does in its interaction with the environment.
The baby scene has a religious connotation, which indeed isn’t present in any of those other films mentioned: it is suggested that the mother is happy in the knowledge that the baby will be raped. It is shot as some kind of a baptism. This figures because the baby is being born into the Demiruge’s evil world, where all of us in the position of getting fucked. In this sense it also has an exquisite black sense of humor.
But what your reviewer, NB, noticed very well, is that in fact there is little in this film more graphic than any ole Tarantino production, people seem to react more to what is being hinted at, or perhaps unconsciously reacting to THE TRUTH they sense in the film’s blunt telling of the fact that there are no morals left other than use value on the Market.
This is what’s subversive about it: it allows you to feel very uncomfortable about what official society deems to be ”moral”.
I am pasting the original snippet from the article by a Serbian (apparently theologically inclined reviewer), which I had previously sent to John
If Serbian movie, in terms of genre, is dominated by elements of thriller and melodrama, pornography is treated as a de-sacralized genre, in “reverse”, ie as a Luciferian order form which it establishes the genre in the original meaning of the term. The victory of pornography in the film is that they were able to film “a shocking film about pornography, without a single scene that would, by definition, be called pornographic.” Pornographers here, as in today’s festival-multiplex reality, usurp the right to define the meaning of the film: while the one-eyed driver-bodyguard has a striking tattoo on his neck in the form of film tape, porn producer and director Vukmir Vukmir (Sergej Trifunovic) equates pornography with art, advocating for the unity of art and life through the “naked art, truth, real people , minimum installation, where pornography, then art, then the movie, “must be an illusion, it must be a direct recording.” Sacrificial, eucharistic meaning, the meaning of art is reversed to show “the life of a victim” (“It’s not porn, that’s life, the life of a victim” – Vukmir), and the only purpose is to create a “new genre”, a new form of film that stops being a film in any previous sense of the word – “newborn porn, a porn film that shows sex with a newborn baby”. So this is not simply creating a new genre among others, but a new understanding of the genre, a creative and form-giving process, art itself. Vukmir, “child psychologist from State Security, with a strong international background, who pulls the hero Milos (Srdjan Todorovic), a pensioned porn star (” Balkan sex god “), into his obscene plans, is initially understood only as artist-philosopher, unmistakably embodies the flip Luciferian side of contemporary art, faced with an unprecedented spiritual crisis, occult-conspiracy games and moneys of dubious origin. In the spirit of true dandyism, the authors discover in the snobbish, Euro-Atlantic pseudodemocracy of many modern artists and “public employees” not only meanness, but also something much worse. In The Serbian film, conversely, as Nikolaj Berđajev (Berdâev) puts it in Uismans (Huysmans), “there is no trace of vulgar platitudes, flippant superficiality and the bourgeoisism of the modernist spirit, the false hipness of modern art and style (which lacks style).”
Though the characters in the movie are constantly monitored by handheld cameras, with numerous carriers and sources of images, as a totally mobile phone recording, Serbian film was shot very scrupulously, by a refined, “old-fashioned” film process, keeping the identity of each frame and each character, respecting their form and sign and their artistic meaning. Each scene, even those with rape babies, which caused the most controversy even before anyone saw the movie, is precisely contextualised in terms of the narrative and its meaning, without moralism and didactics, and also, no evil “pornographic” relativism. The tension between the characters’ ”human-Godly and “Godly-human ” is achieved by a dynamism that does not allow unambiguous ethical judgment, much less enjoyment in evil. The author’s sense of responsibility is therefore almost conservative,the film is not “a live experiment”, but was made with full awareness of the effect that their work should and can produce, with almost traditional “knowledge” and concern about the impact on viewers as integral personalities.
Just as Marquis de Sade creates a new language in a time of the supremacy of the epistolary and the diary, low form models, and unwilling to return to the past, with its outdated, fictional forms, so, facing the lack of genre continuity in his country, and the global dominance of low-level models, the authors of Serbian film, purely out of their love for film and using their right to make fiction, create a new language, which speaks about the now, but not as the language of destruction, rather as the language of creativity, not the language of tautology but the language of metaphors. The language of this movie is based on metaphorization, modelization, semioticizing the elements of “pornographic” art, transforming and “redeeming” them in an overall process of reshaping the art. This particularly comes into play in the second part of the film, especially fragmented and frequently using flashbacks, which reaches a level of simultaneity and multiperspectivity that is rarely seen in contemporary art. This proves that the film does not reject new forms but thinks them through. What most modern films achieve by destroying form, Serbian film achieves by its improvement to increasing levels of transformation power and abstraction.
The temptations of pornography in this film are the temptations of the world, and the authors’ relationship to the world is not eucharistic, but as with most decadents, mostly Gnostic. So, it seeks more liberation from the world, than its salvation, destruction of substance rather than its renewal in Resurrection. A number of symbolic art images in the film point to this: the “antique” torso in Vukmir’s house, the floor tiled in black and white plates, the mock Eucharist, and the purple sunset at the peak of an unimaginable horror, as the hope for an agent communicating with a true deity, that couldn’t have created this world, but who may hear our cry and bring us in its wing, away from the “body of death.” This purple also conjures the mediating and indisputably Gnostic idea of Sofia, the dominant religion in the Russian Silver-century philosophy: “It is God’s purple dawn, breaking in the midst of the darkness of non-existence. It is the eternal sun rising over the matter. “Above all, the ending of the film with its structure evokes the image of the maze, a” dual-axis” BIOS which is given by the law of the Earth’s motion on its axis and the sun and its movement along with the Sun around the center of the galaxy, thus labyrinth of the world and life, but also, of duality, whose outcome is not in the mechanics of material but in the mechanics of spirit, and by whose overcoming we raise to a new level of existence, which might seem to us like death at the moment, but about which we do not and cannot know anything. This is a film about silence and the absolute ignorance of death before death: “There’s nothing there. Vain hope. You will not even encounter the Beast in this evil dawn, standing there in the midst of death as an idiot “.
This bold, interesting and moving film, one of the best in Serbian cinema, reaches as far as you can without a consciousness of the Eucharist and the Resurrection, that is, as far as the human measure reaches. Only from the liturgical perspective, where differences between dogmatics and moral ethos disappear, and the ethos of a man is united with the ethos of God and the ethos of the community, can this become an ethical problem.
Wow, that is a very involved and rather confusing – analysis of the film. I’ll have to watch SF first and read it again.
“The victory of pornography in the film is that they were able to film “a shocking film about pornography, without a single scene that would, by definition, be called pornographic.””
Surely that’s a good thing about the film, and not a victory of pornography…? (Unless he’s talking about the victory of porn as the subject of the film)
This guy seems to celebrate what he sees as the unified moral stance of the film, even if he’s a little alienated by the makers’ Gnostic decadence, and this is what takes it beyond the “vulgar platitudes, flippant superficiality and the bourgeoisism of the modernist spirit, the false hipness of modern art and style (which lacks style)” of the “Euro-Atlantic pseudodemocracy of many modern artists and public employees” (lovin’ that phrase!).
“Pornographers here, as in today’s festival-multiplex reality, usurp the right to define the meaning of the film: while the one-eyed driver-bodyguard has a striking tattoo on his neck in the form of film tape, porn producer and director Vukmir Vukmir (Sergej Trifunovic) equates pornography with art, advocating for the unity of art and life through the “naked art, truth, real people , minimum installation, where pornography, then art, then the movie, “must be an illusion, it must be a direct recording.'”
Does this mean Vukmir is not a pronographer? It’s difficult to know what he’s saying here.
I agree with this guy in so far as aesthetics are not ethics. Life and art are not the same, even if they partake of each other. I tend to think, in a kind of sub-Freudian way, that ethics are born from aesthetics. But ethics cannot by justified by aesthetics, in the same way as one’s actions cannot be justified by an appeal to the beautiful or to the parent, to the Father. This is what Nietzsche got wrong, in my opinion, although I think he also sort of realised that. Aesthetics primarily involves a relationship to enjoyment, or “jouissance” if you want. Hence, Vukmir’s art porn or porny pop-culture like tweenager fashion. Ethics come in when you (at least try to) remove the enjoyment or, at least, try and recognise its injustice. Of course, that removal can perversely (in the Lacanian sense) become another enjoyment: the British puritan looking for another law to employ.
It’s the libinal aspect you mentioned before that has got this film into trouble, at least in the UK. Evil can be enjoyed. The enjoyment stands in for ethics. Where SF excels, according to what you have said about it, is in showing that that enjoyment is the ethics of a social superstructure.
Perhaps this is why Kubrick put a self-imposed ban on A Clockwork Orange in the UK. The other side to the puritan’s enjoyment of law is the British thug’s enjoyment of teenage kicks (to the head). Brits on the piss! Yeaaah! They’re both driven by libido.
The victory of pornography in the film is that they were able to film “a shocking film about pornography, without a single scene that would, by definition, be called pornographic.””
That’s not even certain, there’s definitely some real cocksucking, who did it doesn’t matter, that’s a pornographic ‘scene’, no matter how short, just as Guillaume and Yakatarina fucking (or someone else) in ‘Pola X’. It proves nothing, nothing at all, ‘real porno’ is just as appropriate as ‘suggested porno’ in a film.
The ‘victory of porno’ is that it’s a porno film primarily because it celebrates the libido no matter what it’s up to, by using the most gruesome images to suppress it, as it were, and this doesn’t stop it either. It’s also a legitimate ‘mainstream-type film’ that is a continuation of ‘Last Tango in Paris’ (maybe the first, and there haven’t been many) and the other courageous films that have proven that we should be much more often prone to fucking in public, and that we should do so. Okay, you don’t, I do. I didn’t learn that from this film, that’s why I understood the film and Dejan was afraid to admit she understood it as ‘attractive’ until I said so. What she’s totally fucked up about is that the film is the ONLY thing someone should be thinking about, and that being a BOTTOM is writing in her vile bleug! They are not the same things. I discussed the fucking film with her, and I’m not interested in it forever. There are other things to do in life.
“I agree with this guy in so far as aesthetics are not ethics. Life and art are not the same, even if they partake of each other. I tend to think, in a kind of sub-Freudian way, that ethics are born from aesthetics. But ethics cannot by justified by aesthetics, in the same way as one’s actions cannot be justified by an appeal to the beautiful or to the parent, to the Father. This is what Nietzsche got wrong, in my opinion, although I think he also sort of realised that. Aesthetics primarily involves a relationship to enjoyment, or “jouissance” if you want. Hence, Vukmir’s art porn or porny pop-culture like tweenager fashion. Ethics come in when you (at least try to) remove the enjoyment or, at least, try and recognise its injustice. Of course, that removal can perversely (in the Lacanian sense) become another enjoyment: the British puritan looking for another law to employ.”
That’s a bit of a convoluted mess, now isn’t it? I imagine if Dominic were to be able to watch this film (I doubt he would, since he wouldn’t watch Antichrist for ‘gruesome-image reasons’, I wouldn’t watch it because it sounded dreadful, and Von Trier making statements about America without having ever been here goes against my belief in Place–that attitude stinks). Yes, aesthetics from ethics, but they ‘don’t come in till you try to remove the enjoyment’, which really doesn’t even bear repeating, as yes, what really gets proved here is the ‘sustained British puritan’ (the American is little different when it comes to these matters.)
Eloise didn’t you recently write about symbolic poets or was that my wrong impression? In the further pages of the text above, the author situates the makers of SF in the ”decadence” group of poets, which includes ”snobbists, dandyists and camp”; plenty of mention is made of Baudellaire as well. This group of poets sees as its primary task the creation of a new language; they take the processes of ”semiotization” and ”aestheticization” to their extreme until no possibility of any binary reading remains, only multiple meaning.
I love a good zombie movie, even when I’m not consciously thinking about the zombies’ symbolic function in late capitalism. Presumably the zombies are enraged at having been reduced to the consumerist drive. Their political-economic rage is expressed in a hyperbolized, accelerationistic form of the very exploitation which enrages them, and so we get both the grotesque horror and the manic glee of the zombie movie. So too with the Serbian Movie I’d say.
Yes I did recently write a post quoting Huysmans on the poets of the decadence. He compared late 19th-century France to the decline of the Roman Empire, except that the contemporary decadence was happening during the height of French culture and not after centuries of slow deterioration. Huysmans valued the idiosyncratic over the great, the forbidden pleasure over the conservatory, intoxication over control. There’s the sense not of abandoning the traditions of the old cultural language, but of intensifying them, fermenting them, distilling them to their essence, then getting drunk on them.
The Qliphoth are negative or entropic beings in the universe, and are the opposite of the positive or kaotic beings known as the Sephiroth. The Hebrew root word “qlippah” or “klippah” (plural “qlippoth”) means “shell” or “husk”. Some consider the Qliphoth to be, quite simply, the spirits of the dead, but this is not the case. They may consist of the spiritual energy obtained from either the living, or the dead, and encase themselves in the lighter, etheric shell-bodies of the dead, but they are not the actual Souls of the dead. They are, of course, the entropic, unnatural force in the Universe which drives people towards death, self-destruction, and suffering, because this is what the Qliphoth craves as food.”
Gnosticism is a dualistic theological system. God is all good and the source of all goodness. Everything spiritual is of God and therefore good. Light too is of God and therefore good. Equal to God but diametrically opposed is the devil who is evil and the source of all evil. Everything material is of the devil and therefore evil. Darkness too is of the devil and therefore evil.
Regarding creation, the Gnostics rejected Christian teaching. Instead, they posited that a series of aeons emanate from God in descending order. These aeons are paired, being called “syzygies,” in almost a male-female sense: so the aeons depth and silence produce mind and truth, which produce reason and life, which produce man and state. All together they form the pleroma. As these aeons recede from God, they become less perfect. The last aeon, the Demiurge, creates the material world due to some flaw, sin or passion.
Man is created, but because of some primordial fault, his soul has fallen to this world and is imprisoned in the physical body. While his physical being is corrupt, his spiritual soul is good. In a sense, the good soul is the prisoner of the evil body; therefore, redemption is to release the soul from its bodily prison. To release the soul necessitates awakening the “gnosis,” (the wisdom) within, a gnosis which “has fallen asleep” in physical matter.
According to the Gnostics, individuals fall into three categories: the pneumatikoi are influenced by the spirit, have the necessary gnosis, and are assured salvation; the psychikoi may be saved; and the hylikoi are so influenced by matter that they have no hope of salvation.
This teaching impacted their morality. On one hand, since material things were considered evil, many Gnostics refrained from eating meat, marriage and conjugal love (because one would not want to imprison another soul). On the other hand, since a person who had the gnosis and was under the influence of the spirit was assured salvation, some Gnostics lived licentious lives of debauchery.
In the end, universal salvation will come when the pneumatikoi achieve redemption, the Demiurge is conquered and the material world destroyed.
hahaha, if you desire only to be rude (if you want to tease and flirt, that’s no better than the Vegas-y PUA}, go and observe the sacrifices of gnosticism. You’ve certainly earned at least that. They’re all there, and that ‘Course in Miracles’ is definitely an insane Gnostic text, the stupid cunt. After all that ‘there is no death’ shit, she promptly ‘dies’. I asked one of the fanatics of this cult ‘why did she die then?’ the answer ‘well, she just died’. The ‘course’, which calls itself ‘a required course’, says the ‘body doesn’t grow old or ever even die, its purpose is simply fulfilled and it is gently laid by’. You can’t find more stupid shit than that, and Oprah loved it.
Gnosticism seems little different from orthodox Christianity at the bottom of it–or any of the other organized religions. You just adhere to the ones that seem to be working for you, and sometimes you ‘believe them’ and try to ‘live by their tenets’, sometimes the most established and traditional ones seem more useful if you don’t find any of them that believable as such.
Now it came about, when men began to multiply on face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of gods saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. Then Yahweh said, “My spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; his days will be a hundred and twenty years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of gods came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children by them. Those were the mighty men of old, men of renown.
Gnosticism is a dualistic theological system. God is all good and the source of all goodness. Everything spiritual is of God and therefore good. Light too is of God and therefore good. Equal to God but diametrically opposed is the devil who is evil and the source of all evil. Everything material is of the devil and therefore evil. Darkness too is of the devil and therefore evil.
So as I told you before the Christian Orthodox church condemns this as a heresy because matter is portrayed as bad. Nothing bad can come out of a perfect God. By shutting matter out and with it the world, the Gnostics are busy with a narcissistic project of self-reflection. There is no involvement with God without an involvement with the world. It’s not that the Orthodox church explains howso matter is good; it is spoken of a mysterious ie inexplicable unity of body and soul in Christ. Hence this isn’t something one could access by philosophizing.
All the main branches of Christianity condemn gnosticism as heresy. Gnosticism was the main dispute within the church prior the East-West, Orthodox-Catholic split. Though the gnostics were purged, we know about the return of the repressed. Orthodox iconography and theosis show strong gnostic influence. I’d say Paul was pretty gnostically inclined himself, with his whole flesh-spirit internal warfare and his praxis of dying to self so that the inner Christ could shine through. Paul says that man inherits corruption through Adam, but Christ is the second Adam and through his death we die to our old fleshly nature and take on Christ’s spiritual nature. Etc. Through purification and knowledge man becomes an avatar of the gods: it’s implicit in Pauline theology. Psychoanalysis is gnostic, with its jousts against the demiurgic Oedipus and the Name of the Father and the Big Other and so on. Analysis is a gnostic praxis of enlightenment in which the unconscious god speaks through us, so that by becoming channels of the Real we attain pneumatikoi status.
Gnosticism seems little different from orthodox Christianity at the bottom of it–or any of the other organized religions. You just adhere to the ones that seem to be working for you, and sometimes you ‘believe them’ and try to ‘live by their tenets’, sometimes the most established and traditional ones seem more useful if you don’t find any of them that believable as such.
What a wonderful Reader’s Digest wisdom there. You just ‘believe a little’ you ‘live by it a little’ and then ‘you die a little’. But all the time, you’re having all these great cakes and your wallpaper is impeccable. Darling, I am no passionate believer in organized religion, but I have never dared to say that there is no God. What if I end up over the Rainbow some day and it turns out that there IS a God.
Eloise I’m still no wiser about this problem. You can stretch the ‘Gnostic’ considerably (in Wilson’s book, all kinds of things fall under Gnosis, including kabala and alchemy). And much as I believe that no single product of the human mind is without its insights and merits, there must be some finite point where you say ‘this just isn’t true’. Otherwise the universe would be a disorganized mess just like the Egyptian Temptress’s vagina.
Bitchness reading your account of the Stewart I remembered what I definitely didn’t like about the States, and that was the feeling at Universal studios that you’re constantly hoarded and goaded into doing something. If you don’t smile or experience joy on cue, they almost want to make you pay another ticket. The States struck me then as a very Communist country, because this is exactly what you get in Russia as well – this mass organization of optimism.
NB I have to apologize for the (indeed) confusing nature of the text; it is not my translator’s mistake, but the original text, it is written in the manner of a lithurgical diatribe, in a kind of an old-fashioned poetic way. I found myself not understanding the same points you mention, but because I also read the remaining 10 pages which I didn’t have time to translate, I know that what he means is that the authors have used the tropes of pornography to non-pornographic ends. he draws a distinction between pornography as something that basically exploits (existing worlds and images), and pornographic art (which is also something like my own personal ambition), as something that creates a new language. he refers to the poets of french symbolism to draw a parallel, and he mentions de sade and jenet (I agree with both these references).
vukmir in this scenario would be the pornographer, someone who tries to exploit, but i think milos is the artist here because he has that constantly hard cock. to the extent that this cock stands for the Lacanian Drive (not: libido in the Freudian sense) – an energetic field that does not choose any objects and always gets satisfied – it manages to evade the dialectic of desire which runs pornography and capitalism. and milos’s drive, his anger, is exactly that part of the film that hits you (the second half of the film).
You said:
Where SF excels, according to what you have said about it, is in showing that that enjoyment is the ethics of a social superstructure.
This part you can ascribe to Pasolini’s SALO, where the fascists hold the license of pleasure: noone else may enjoy. But as I explain above, there is no enjoyment in Serbian Film. Perhaps the only enjoyable sex is with the innocent baby. Everything else is for domination and submission. From this you see that the libido, the driving force, is not desire, but the Drive.
To release the soul necessitates awakening the “gnosis,” (the wisdom) within, a gnosis which “has fallen asleep” in physical matter
The GNOSIS is another issue. The church says it is vanity, because only intelligent people can then know God, people who possess a special knowledge. But in Porno Banda, you see that innocents get saved: people without much knowledge.
“What if I end up over the Rainbow some day and it turns out that there IS a God. ”
that will be just fine with me. I’m not concerned with your particular destiny. I already had to explain everything to you, you’re that stupid. You said Eloise and NB hadn’t realized fully understood Serbian Film, and ‘even you’ were afraid to admit it. But the film can also be interpreted as Werminist: Milos, unlike me, will go back into a scene without any idea of what it offers him–in this scene, he is your ‘Bottom’, even though he’s still got the Cock. But the rest can have at least some revenge on him. I went back briefly to CPC, only to find that you and lafayette are the same low-class assholes that you always seemed to be. You were looking for the same games as before, and you thought ‘all it really will take is to get him started again, just get his foot in the door’. Et alors? Yes, for one week, till I found out what totally worthless pigs you are, without a single redeeming quality. Liars, cheats, you name it. And screaming because I won’t listen to your other DVD on your asshole schedule. I think I won’t watch it for several months, and you can discuss all your mystical bullshit with Eloise and NB till you all ROT.
“reading your account of the Stewart I remembered what I definitely didn’t like about the States, and that was the feeling at Universal studios that you’re constantly hoarded and goaded into doing something. If you don’t smile or experience joy on cue, they almost want to make you pay another ticket. The States struck me then as a very Communist country, because this is exactly what you get in Russia as well – this mass organization of optimism.”
Well, you would think something like that, even though it was very comfortable and they did nothing of the sort. What they did was no different from TV has been from its very beginnings, with blinking lights for applause and using laugh tracks. There was someone, a child who did get sick early on, they stopped the proceedings, even though they told us we couldn’t leave our seats during the filming, but when an emergency occurred they did do so, and there were emergency exits pointed out at the very beginning. It had nothing to do with ‘mass organization of optimism’, but since you didn’t get to go, you have to find something to make it look like Arpege would have seen it. If you go to Martha Stewart Show looking for Bertolt Brecht, then you might as well go to jail. Everybody was treated extremely courteously, and they don’t make you pay for a single thing, even give out lots of books and gifts in the audience, and everybody got one of those Martha Stewart Living Magazines, even if they FROWNED the whole time–yeah, not but $4.99 on the newsstand, but you’ll appreciate sums like that, but it hadn’t been necessary at all. Sure, her outfit is superrich, and she had been on the board of the New York Stock Exchange before she got caught misbehaving, but that doesn’t mean all wealthy outfits bother with being gracious. But–glad you weren’t there, that’s all I can say. You’re vile and vicious.
Given the clear roots of Serbian film (directed by Srdjan Spasojevic, 2010) in the poetics of decadence and the controversy sparked by the film, both at home and abroad, with serious threats of judicial bans and seizure of recorded material, this film is a good occasion to review certain modelization and ethical aspects of art theory and art.
While the idea of art as a model dates back to Aristotle’s understanding of concepts and mimesis mithos, based on the cognitive and ontological separation between the physis and the technical, critical for the formation of the basic categories of Western culture, concepts and modelizations today are mostly associated with the meanings given to them within Russian structural semiotics , with an emphasis on the work of Yuri Lotman (Lotman). As meta-linguistic structure, work of art is a second instance of the modelization system, a model (French form, mold) can be simply defined as an analogue of an object if and when in the process of knowledge it takes the role of the object itself. ” The model, therefore, serves as the deputy object, and ”since art gets to know life by reshaping it”, this provides “the opportunity to interpret one the basic features of art – knowledge by reshaping – as the phenomenon of modeling. Art thereby has a great modelization power: “The ability of art to access the most complex object models and relationships, that with the help of any other assets could not be known, puts a special stamp on the nature of models in art.” Art is therefore a privileged and powerful tool for the cognitive structuring of reality, overcoming of entropy and chaos, through the possibility of a unique interaction of the whole and its parts, in accordance with modern energy developments and the information science paradigm based on synergetics, quantum-holographic paradigms and fractal theory; mapping infinitely complex reality in a regulated system with a finite number of elements and their mutual relations”, it is actually modeling.
“you can discuss all your mystical bullshit with Eloise and NB till you all ROT.”
This might make a good animated short; we could even discuss the meaning of our own putrescence until we finally melt into a pool of fetid and (blessedly) silent goo.
Maybe take a Svankmajer approach: the goo continually reshapes itself into the discussants, only to collapse again, etc. etc. in an eternal return. Sort of like the end of Serbian Film: there is no end.
The Mimetic tradition, to which the theory of modelization belongs, rests on an acceptance of the world of the techna, i.e. man’s ability to use skill, craft, and art, based on reason (fronesis) and ability of building, creation (poiesis), and thereby participate in the truth. Similar to the ancient understanding of theory, art is thus far from just passive observation and copying of some fixed reality, truth, or life, but a dynamic process of learning, participation in the observed reality, a transformative activity which doesn’t just show its object and points to it, but gives the possibility of expressing the truth of the object itself, such as could not have existed without the creative process that spawned it, but which is also, in a way, synchronous to it. In defiance of rationalism and the metaphysic cult of authenticity, characterized by a faith in reaching truth by human reason, the mimetic tradition, pointing to the importance of art to human life, focuses attention on the creation process itself ,the building of the artwork, as an energetic and practical deed which considerably transcends Descartes’s concept of subject-object, cancelling out the belief in an absolute truth defined by man, but without renouncing the privilege of seeking out truth.
I will continue the translation tomorrow, I first have to tell the DICK CHENEY HOG that I don’t care what she says, because she will always come back to my Dungeon, to exercise her profound masochism with Lafayette or whatever stand-on of Nick Land happens to be hanging around at my place.
So these hissings merely sound like Marlene threatening to break the contract even if she knows well that it supplies her BOOZE.
“to exercise her profound masochism with Lafayette or whatever stand-on of Nick Land happens to be hanging around at my place.”
That’s the best, and even worth waiting for–you make it easy to stay out with such shit. I don’t want a ‘stand-on of Nick Land’ or even the ‘real Nick Land’. I obviously once thought I did, and you still insist I do–that’s not because you really still think it, but since I can hardly avoid you even if I do stay out of there, it’s true, he’d be the only reason to go back in there. But if he’s nothing but a shit, no, that’s the way you like to be treated, not me. And it’s very easy to treat you like shit.
When I went there for the week this time, I didn’t think the ‘lafayette’ was Nick Land, but I didn’t know he’d then just prove to be quite the same kind vermin as Nick Land is. So it’s your turn to find out about the ‘Great Man Nick Land’, I saw that Mrs. Fisher is promising a podcast of her, Mrs. Mackay, Mrs. Brassier, and maybe there’ll be even a guest appearance from the laboratories of Urbanatomy with Mr. and Mrs. Greenspan sitting around their cold-world hearths. I’m sure Dominic would not want to miss this, as he’s written me “Christ, Patrick, the company you keep”, but has been told in no uncertain terms that I do not exactly thing kpunk and Mrs. Nymphomania are The Social Register. He’s a little more interesting than the rest, more talented and better-looking, but I don’t trust him any more than the rest of you FREAKS!
Anyway, you tried to get information out of me (using Eloise as ‘legitimacy’) and failed to do so, either on email or bleug. In the old days, I would have told you (or at least emailed Eloise.) I won’t now. I know TRUE insanity when I run into it, and when people write a letter to me and then send it to other parties (without asking me), as if I will then automatically cooperate with their fucked-up scheme, and want other endless legal numbers done, it becomes clear who’s lying. But I already told you you could probably find that out on your own. If you do, that’s just marvelous, but you’ll get no cooperation out of me.
As for you and lafayesitsmenickland, I will see that as ‘The Continuing Adventures of Vermin and Wermin’ (I know that, since you want her as a husband, and I wanted her as a wife, you are now proud to show off your revenge, even though you pretended to be in love with the beer-bellied OOO person.) But he won’t ever tell you anything about his ‘real life’ either, because he was never interested in you to begin with, he just thought I’d cooperate with him endlessly. As someone with a family, he probably is forced to deal with that all the time, although he’s a nerd too (and has always admitted it), but you don’t mind that. Just so long as your bleug stats keep coming in. Why don’t you slip over to London early next week and meet all these people? It’ll be just like being with your bleug-partner.
I will say one thing for him: He doesn’t follow me everywhere the way you do. Although NB is certainly no prize either, and is clearly involved with them, etc., has merely tried to improve his manners slightly out of respect to Eloise. WHO GIVES A FUCK.
Weaving through the theorist’s technical talk, the idea of artist as godlike Creator is of course well-regarded since at least the Romantic era in the West. Seeking truth through the creative process rather than through reason: that too is Romantic. The Demiurgic Creator didn’t explain or interpret his actions; he just did it. The ancient gnostics were I think more passive knowers, trying to probe the eternal truths behind the corrupt material creation, not unlike the Greek idealists. But to become a human creator is to take sides with the Demiurge, to make truth rather than only knowing truth. The intent is, I believe, to preserve the elements and overall structure of gnosticism but reject or invert or Mobius-ize the dualism of matter/creation=evil and form/thought=good.
Ktismatics 
here’s in a nutshell what i think about this movie of the century (and if my hero, and cyberpunk icon, says it’s great, then it’s great). first off, i think that it carries the eastern-orthodox message that salvation is in this life, in the body and in the ground, because the body and the spirit, like eros and thanatos, are inextricably linked; i’d like to discuss however and in relation to your flagellation book, how we’re to draw the line with masochism and nihilism. second, i think it proposes a marvelous ”new” aesthetics, quotation marks deliberate because the tradition is as old as serbia, where the director, casting himself in the role of Jesus, undergoes crucifixion and in the end death, to undergo a personal cleansing through the body of his artwork; precisely because it is personal, the cleansing also becomes social and creates a strong sense of community, which is why the film didn’t strike me as pessimistic in the end. third, the movie shows you what my idea was with the satire, because me and djordjevic we are a bit like doppelgangers that way. i agree with djordjevic that pornography with a sociopolitical edge has that much-needed subversive streak. now we can expand on these thoughts and you can add any of your own, of course.
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I agree with your evaluation, satire. Early in the film the director of the Porno Gang says something about how he’s trying to create a merger or contest of Eros and Thanatos in which Thanatos prevails, and that’s what happens. The two lovers become “eternal travelers” together, so there’s a looking toward the afterlife. But the damnation-redemption happens in this life. The porno gang is an anarcho-syndicalist workers’ commune, but the capitalists and the people, while benefiting from the gang’s work, fuck the gang over. We see the porno gang literally fucking the earth, which brings forth a fucked-up new life that creates delusion and consumerist addiction and undeadness. And the earth fucks the gang in return, when the crude and cruel villagers rape them and the snuff producer coopts their artistic vision with corrupt Western money. In final triumph the director does rid the world of the capitalist exploiters, the porn producer and the snuff producer. But what appears to be a rebirth of the porno gang’s artistic and redemptive vision turns out also to be its curtain call. And I guess that’s the redemption: the final acceleration of the Eros-Thanatos engine, breaking through the boundary between art and life on the artist’s own terms. The show, beginning as a kind of cleansing parody of the culture, being transformed into a sort of grotesque outgrowth of that culture, ultimately becomes an active purifier of the culture.
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Yes to all that, and
”the Eros-Thanatos engine”
I hadn’t thought of the Western forces (as represented by Franz, the snuff movie maker) in terms of the undead, but now I see that the metaphor is apt. It seems like they want to stare at the spectacle of dying because they are unable to die themselves (on several occasions the victims complain that their death is being delayed). I am reminded of Shaviro’s early writings in The Cinematic Body about that moment when the protagonists of ”Dawn of the Dead” stare in the zombie’s eyes, and are somehow unable to move despite being able to physically. But, what is the moral then – that life is already death, so that only by dying you can live? It sounds like nihilism, and masochism, but paradoxically I don’t get a negative connotation out of this thought.
* additional explication: when Marko sees Una for the first time, in the theater, she is playing in some nondescript production where she is apparently ”the girl of Kosovo”. This is a reference to the Kosovo myth, and a famous Serbian painting in which the dying soldier, after the battle, gets water from such a girl. I think Kosovo is conjured consciously because of the Orthodox meaning of sacrifice. According to the myth, Serbs were ”moral winners” despite having lost terribly to the much more superior Imperial Turkish army.
Those scenes of killing by the way are so powerfully visceral that they’re not exactly impossible to watch, but certainly imprint themselves in the manner of visions even after repeated viewings, and I had many during the subtitling. Also there were some performances that easily put to shame the entire commercial production of the last ten years, like the psychotic guy with the razor.
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The guy with the razor was excellent, his suicidal excitement being palpable and nearly contagious. Was the “girl of Kosovo” the scene in which some porn action is disrupted by a bombing? That was pretty funny.
The live snuff cabaret was strange. Una didn’t think the father of that family deserved to die because he hadn’t committed any sin, the implication being that the other snuff victims had and that the Gang was meting out justice in a way. Then they perform this scene for the decadent rich Americans speaking their lines in English. At the last moment the cops come and break up the show, saving the innocent man. But the would-be snuff victim is in despair: he had reconciled himself to his death, had made a deal to save his family financially, etc. The whole story is repeatedly ambivalent.
The Gang were compromised by Franz and the snuff-for-money scheme. You know what’s happening to us, don’t you? Una asks Marko as they get more and more embroiled with Franz and killing displaces fucking as the focus of the show. He’s impotent by then, no longer desiring sex. They’re being coerced by money onto a death spiral, which does drag down most of the Gang. It’s not until Marko comes out the other side that his libido is restored, along with a real passion to kill the death-dealing money men whose patrons are the undead wealthy audience who pay people to live — and especially to die — for their entertainment. I think you’re right, satire: the Westerners in this movie can neither live nor die for themselves, but can only pay and watch others do it.
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Una didn’t think the father of that family deserved to die because he hadn’t committed any sin, the implication being that the other snuff victims had and that the Gang was meting out justice in a way.
In an interview Djordjevic said that his characters were not ”fit” to live in this world and that he therefore helped them, relieved them of suffering. I think Marko over time grows this narcissistic illusion (which he throws back at Una – he says ”you are not God to judge who has sin”) that he is some kind of a Demiurge, which is reinforced when at the Orthodox monastery he tells the priest that when he thinks about his faith,he only sees his own reflection. But do you think he could be seen as Christ – in his student movie, I had that impression – undergoing a trajectory similar to Kazantsakis’s ”Last Temptation”?
I was talking about the theater where Una appears in an episodic role as the girl who heals the soldier after the battle. This is right before she meets Marko at the party afterwards. (”Marko” is also the name of the famous warrior in Kosovo, the Kraljevic Marko – but this reference will escape most non-native viewers) Here is a link to the paradigmatic painting:
The gender politics is extremely complex. Although the anarcho-socialist narrative conjures up some kind of Western queer liberationism (hence also the ”trash aesthetics” of John Waters) I think it’s clear that Djordjevic doesn’t one-sidedly endorse this any more than he endorses patriarchalism. I found it understandably painful, for example, to watch the hiv-positive top seduce the tranny, and it certainly wasn’t nice when the tall guy (who decides to stay with the church) left the chubby girl. But more widely, although the Phallus is clearly being called to the stand, it is also true that Mother Earth has become infertile, and that female nurturing is sorely lacking everywhere.
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But the would-be snuff victim is in despair: he had reconciled himself to his death, had made a deal to save his family financially, etc. The whole story is repeatedly ambivalent.
Yes ambivalence is interesting, he never moralizes, or takes sides, good and bad light and darkness mud and pink are always mixed. That live show drawns on a folk custom called ”lapot”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapot_(senicide)
which by the way still exists in hilly Montenegro. Sometimes, as in the movie, bread or corn is placed on the head of the elderly target, making it seem as though it is bread and not me who is killing you. This might be the key to interpreting the Orthodoxy, for with this act one is also symbolically rid of ”sin” and ”guilt”, which is attributed to the corrupted Mother Earth through the bread.
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Off-topic: the Narcissistic Cat has now reconciled herself with the splitting inherent in Lacanian love, and has blissfully embraced the allure of frigid yet sensuous objects; her feline enthousiasm about these Diagrams of Love is enormously entertaining, and she is certainly the more flamboyant part of the lesbian couple, erm, fraternity. Once I establish a safe working environment I will add a very special twist to the last episode of the Objects, in which as you remember we were about to see what happens when the Temptess and the Cat are placed in a teleportation system.
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“the allure of frigid yet sensuous objects.”
As far as I know, no physicists are currently studying the fourfold divide of objects, the forces causing these splits, or the nature and source of object-allure. It makes for ontological and psychological consistency for Levi to regard Lacan’s split subject as an extension of a universal splitting taking place inside every object. Graham’s fourfold looks to me like it’s been inspired by Lacan: his division between the sensual object and the real object corresponds directly to Lacan’s distinction between the Imaginary and the Real, while the split between qualities and essence corresponds to the distinction between the Symbolic and the Real. Once Levi converts Graham’s 2 by 2 table into a Lacanian 3-fold with Borromean overlaps, he will have achieved full integration.
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Definitely Marko is a Jesus figure. This ties the story to the flagellant processions, and also to Orthodox iconography. The priest gives Marko an icon of the patron saint of travelers, and at the end Marko tells Una that the two of them are eternal travelers. Marko iconically participates with the eternal travelers of Christianity, paradigmatic among whom was Jesus, whose redemptive praxis was a wandering one, accompanied by his disciples, a demiurgic wanderer among men.
The snuff cabaret described the lapot legend to the decadent American audience, but I had no idea that there was some truth to this practice of killing the elderly. I was going to put up a screengrab of the villagers, who are portrayed with rare exception as ugly, crude, and violent in this film. This is another divide: the sophisticated decadence of the Belgrade urban performers with the hicks from the sticks who are their audience and pursuers.
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This is another divide: the sophisticated decadence of the Belgrade urban performers with the hicks from the sticks who are their audience and pursuers.
I would say that this portrayal is pretty much accurate, although I also applaud the film for not being… simplistic. For example, there is a marvellous parallel drawn between e.g. the abuse that the tranny Ceca suffers from her father, and the abuse Marko suffers in Belgrade (his father doesn’t want to give any of his big cash for the movies) and you could also say I think that the porno gang meets their equivalent in all of the snuff victims, who are equally despondent and abused.
There is also tremendous humor in all this which I’m not sure comes across linguistically. For example, when Ceca gives her poignant speech about her early sex life, one of the villagers stands up and shouts ”Come to grand-daddy so I can stretch your ass” and you can’t help but laugh even as you’re confronted with the abjection of his snide remarks; to which Ceca, instead of launching into some female empowerment antic like Lady Gaga, immediately sucks the horse’s cock.
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That line worked fine for me — globally funny. A lot of this movie was funny and ridiculous, but only when it intended to be. I got absorbed into the whole project, a very effective working through of the idea.
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Once Levi converts Graham’s 2 by 2 table into a Lacanian 3-fold with Borromean overlaps, he will have achieved full integration.
We have yet to reach the dramatic climax of the cabaret, though, for at the moment the Narcissistic Cat is still working in her Mentor’s shadow. What if somehwere along the way she discovers something brilliant OF HER OWN, and then the Tempress shows her teeth (so far she’s been snarling in low key at Shaviro, but Shaviro isn’t really a disciple). Then we will see whether the flat ontology has truly collapsed the Phallus.
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A lot of this movie was funny and ridiculous,
There are some hard-to-translate parts. For example, you say ”do jaja” in Serbian, which literally means ”to the balls”, when you want to express delight. When in the climactic snuff scene, with the bearded druggie decapitating the village psycho Leatherface-style, Marko exclaims ”Do jaja!”, by referring to sex, the expression suggests that at this point the sex and the death have melded into the death drive, that he experiences this decapitation as sex.
Also I didn’t translate the recurrent cuss ”I will fuck your mother” – typical for Serbian – which keeps referring us back to the gang’s central act, and the unsuccessful fertilization of Mother Earth.
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I’m sure it’s impossible to capture some of these culture-specific nuances. Your subtitles were clear and well-placed in the film, very professionally done.
Last night I saw Hot Tub Time Machine, which believe it or not I recommend especially for the frenetic, almost chaotic pacing. To your second point though, there’s a scene where the 20-year-old nerd is watching his uncle’s wacky friend having sex with his slutty mother. “Motherfucker!” yells the 20-year-old — an immature joke to be sure, but I got a kick out of it.
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There’s another thought that’s been obsessing me – the last scene, the razor, the cut. I thought again of Peretz’s book, and of the elevator scene in Dressed to Kill, which I think is a similar scene. What do you think?
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From Oedipus’s blindness – the essential tragic image that shows the discovery of the image to be the discovery of one as doomed and trapped in a destiny to which one is blind – to the nightmarish visions of the double in ETA Hoffmann or EA Poe and the fatal visions of the doomed heroes and heroines of film noir, the discovery of the dimension of the image was often understood by art as revealing the dimension of man’s fate to which man is blind. Yet FEMME FATALE shows that we need to liberate ourselves from this understanding of the image as an announcement of a destiny. We need to liberate ourselves for a dimension of futurity without content, specifically the content that the concept of destiny gave it, which is a defense against the blank and blinding nothingness insicribed in the image. We need to liberate from the view of fate and fatality inscribed in the image understood as a femme fatale, as a double-crossing creature exposing us to our own blindness. The Image blinds, but it is not a blinding that shows our entrapment in a destiny, but a blindness activating the possibility of a new, visionary power, and of a new life.
(page 164, Coda)
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Does the cut open to a new and undestined life in Porno Gang? The hero speaks of the two of them being eternal travelers, which seems to betoken an afterlife more in keeping with the old-school eternal visionary that Peretz believes DePalma has left behind. But if we regard this final cut as a passing-beyond of ordinary cinematic constraints into some new life, then maybe the undestined is what’s being signaled here. What other ending would have made this point clearer, after the hero had killed off the porno boss and the snuff producer? As it stands, the end does seem either nihilistic or redemptive in a Jesus’ self-sacrificial sense.
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What I’m thinking is that for the story to be redemptive, the Porno Gang would need to have a transcendent goal, some kind of an idealism; but they don’t. Their rebellion is motivated by ”pushing boundaries” but it’s really just motivated by Marko’s artistic narcissism. Even the last victim is not saved because the Porno Gang wants to save him, but by the deus ex machina. So I’m thinking about this lack of content, this total flatness, this is what resonates in Peretz’s quote.
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From your Peretz quote: “We need to liberate ourselves for a dimension of futurity without content, specifically the content that the concept of destiny gave it, which is a defense against the blank and blinding nothingness insicribed in the image… The Image blinds, but it is not a blinding that shows our entrapment in a destiny, but a blindness activating the possibility of a new, visionary power, and of a new life.
So what vision does the flat blindness of Porno Gang show, what new life? The characters are dead, they’re talking about becoming eternal travelers. For Jesus the cuts were redemptive: even if God forsakes him on the cross, the Bible assures the believers that by his wounds we are healed. Have you ever seen Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross? Here’s a sort of animated presentation of these 14 gigantic modernist paintings, each of which thematizes the blindness and the cut. Does Marko show the end of the narcissistic vision? What then? Has he saved us, the viewers, from making the same mistake, so that by his wounds we are healed from ourselves? How is the flatness, sliced through the wrists, anything but an image of “nihil unbound”?
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Things are different in De Palma: there you have the Light, which Peretz uses as a basis of his discussion. But in light of Shaviro’s new article, Djordjevic is more about intensities and cuts. The film seems to operate on a kind of a permanent RUSH, for want of a better word. It’s not especially fast, it’s more like it behaves in a wild, intense way which seems to suggest a permanent ”living in the moment”. There is a special, palpable quality to its Affect. But my point is that there is no motivation, and hence no redemption, in the events depicted. The porno gang doesn’t go on a trip to fight for the Truth, the socialistic-anarchist connotation is just a side effect, and they don’t spare the Lapot victim out of moral conviction – rather, because police came at the last moment. This is where the ”futurity without content” comes in. Inside this very emptiness, and meaninglessness,blakness, or seeming nihilism, comes the attempt to reclaim life through death, and ironically the whole dead porno gang is more alive than their German audiences. (The futurity I think refers to how everything, from scene 1 of Marko’s student film, is a foreshadowing or a refraction of this initial and/or final event, Jesus’s self-mutilation before the crying pig, therefore a kind of a future perfect tense)
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As one of the commenters on Youtube remarked, it looks like you can’t pick any of that Newman up if you don’t see it in the museum, despite the gorgeous Mozart
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I thought it was a long time ago you wrote this up. Dejan sent me a copy of it yesterday, but I’m not particularly interested in taking the time to watch this, as there was a certain amount of physical discomfort involved in watching ‘serbian film’, but that’s enough. I’d be interested to know if they are similar–I frankly just don’t care that much about how the ‘society causes’ all this and they’re ‘interwoven’ since, of course, they have been since Warhol’s ‘Flesh’ and ‘Lonesome Cowboys’ and ‘Heat’ ushered in the Golden Age of Hardcore Porno. Admittedly, ‘Serbian Film’ is very good, but it’s not like you need to keep thinking about it.
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I’d be interested to know if they are similar
They are complementary, but the Porno Gang is in a totally different key (equally brilliant if not more, as it mixes genres with more elasticity than the Serbian Film)
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I agree with pc’s summary. Porno Gang is more nuanced than Serbian Film, which I suppose could be said for 99.9999% of all films. I liked this one too, as you can see from the comments.
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Patrick if you’re watching there’s a segment of maybe 2 minutes, after the first snuff murder, without translation (I translated the film, which was a very rush job so I overlooked this one). Don’t panic, because the translation returns after 2 minutes.
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Eloise did you read the Serbian theorist’s analysis I sent, it’s really good, and it touches upon the Gnostic aspect. I don’t have time tonight to translate the other 20 pages but there’s a ton of interesting stuff about theological interpretation, Russian formalism, Kojeve, Derrida, plus a taste of Nikolai Berdzajev, the Russian philosopher I mentioned before who is totally unknown in the West.
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Thanks for sending me that piece and for doing the translation, pc. Yes I read it, found it intriguing. The theorist acts as if Serbian Film were some sort of apocalypse without resurrection, which is a bit hyperbolic for my tastes, but I will get back to the piece you translated and interact with it.
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More specifically I think he´s saying that the Gnostic perspective would be the one without Resurrection (same thing I noticed myself), because matter is bad, but I am under the impression that in THE PORNO GANG the New Testament comes back and in this sense it goes beyond Gnosticism, BACK INTO THE MATTER. This movement is now endlessly intriguing, the rabbit is there.
´´Akshions do have konsequenses, and yet, there is the MAGICK“
I loved how Bitchness – whose BITCH SWITCH is now turned to -1 because she found another reason to blame me for keeping Lafayette employed – emphasized the upset of her stomach while watching the SF. I don´t believe for a second that she had any bodily discomfort, only an iron hard erection, especially in those scenes where you see Milosh´s dick dangling.
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no, not mon estomac, and I didn’t even say so, but rather the chair I had to use. It was, however, worth the whole thing, because I have a DVD player at my worthy and expense-free disposal, although I will not be discussing ‘Porno Gang’ with you.
“but I am under the impression that in THE PORNO GANG the New Testament comes back and in this sense it goes beyond Gnosticism, BACK INTO THE MATTER. This movement is now endlessly intriguing, the rabbit is there.”
How thoughtful and you talk about that stupid rabbit again. Who needs such a silly esoteric analysis? Serbian Film didn’t need it, and you were just as unfocussed as your ‘wyrmyrn’ until I watched it. In this way, you continue your unhallowed existence, ‘married’ to lafayetc, who is happy to honour your idiocy in wanting a ‘cyber-marriage’ that you can turn into a bank account for yourself!
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Who needs such a silly esoteric analysis?
Well certainly not YOU, you’re a vampire and in this sense secure in the knowledge that you’ll always be able to fuck. Us mere mortals have to think about what happens with our asses post mortem.
Still I think you can enjoy the Gang on other levels; there are things in it like the anal baptism scene in SF, e.g. horsesucking with Ceca the tranny, but let me not spoil the fun.
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As I said, I’ll get back to the essay later, but meanwhile I gave you my initial gnostic reading of Porno Gang: it’s gnostic in the sense of salvation coming after death in some ideal state. It’s accelerationist: if matter is the corruption that keeps you from blessedness, but if we’re all material beings on earth, then immerse yourself in that corruption in order to hasten the day of transcendence. I see no return to matter, nor any material redemption, at the end of that film. Serbian Film too is accelerationist, but doesn’t transcend or redeem matter.
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Serbian Film too is accelerationist, but doesn’t transcend or redeem matter.
Ah, I see now, since I hate Dejan and lafayetc with all my heart, I wished that I could deny the greatness of ‘Serbian Film’, but alas, I cannot.
But ‘Porno Gang’ clearly wasn’t intelligent enough to realize that a film should never point toward redemption, but only annihilation and total hopelessness, horror and desolation (if they start out with this sort of thing; I can still use the DVD player for Babs concerts, you know…) With ‘Serbian Film’ you just have to go on with the work after it’s over, and you can do it like Milos, or choose the other ‘alternative ending’ I spoke of.
Dominic has an interesting new post about frustration, how it is valueless in itself, but in feeling it all the way you can then be fully absorbed (although necessarily, he would want to proclaim ‘joy in non-enjoyment’, when frankly, just going all the way through the frustration allows a release, quite often followed by action to ‘repair’–and in cases where the desired ‘repair’ isn’t going to happen, some kind of peace might be achieved. This isn’t exactly what he says, but it’s my deterritorialization of his post, which I mustn’t touch a ce moment, because he put ‘unpleasure’ in there, so I’d let other folks join in and share….so therefore ‘Serbian Film’ is all frustration, it makes you feel the Whole Enchilada, and in this way, you are purged–much like the real director, who is obviously a sadist, unlike the in-house director, who ‘suffers for her art’, behaving like some Tarantino hag on the floor.
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Fuck, my whole point is this is again like the points I was making a good while back about Racine not ‘talking about God’ in his plays, and Martha Graham not ‘talking about universal brotherhood’ in her dances–they are best left found where they may or may not be, in the non-material, which is NOT on-film, in-play, or in-dance. These, when tragic, can map out the horror of life, and should leave it horrible, although skillfully, or it will just be more schlock, and we can’t have that, can we? and then you can go to ‘heaven’ if it’s there to go to, or just be ‘remembered and cherished by family and friends’, etc. In this way, ‘Serbian Film’ goes all the way with hell, which is what we should be concerned with, just like Racine and Graham do, and if there’s heaven, it will take care of itself.
But TALKING about it is so pedestrian!
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But ‘Porno Gang’ clearly wasn’t intelligent enough to realize that a film should never point toward redemption, but only annihilation and total hopelessness, horror and desolation
God apparently you´re choking on your own unproductive bile at the moment because it was YOU who noticed in the Serbian Film that the annihilation and the hopelessness are life-affirming, which paradox is the whole subject of the conversation. Now you´re harping on some pedestrian adolescent rage related to your bimboid love affair with the hyperstitionists.
Must I suffer this after I was forced to think about DOT PALIN during Piranja 3D, her enraged face spoiling every decent cockshot of which there were plenty in this failed mysoginistic masterpiece.
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Return to matter consists in the fact that the characters discover in the flesh, in everyday life, not a source of transcendence (towards the Gnostic ”higher spiritual realm”), but the possibility of forgiveness, of an unselfish act, which you see in the Lapot episode.
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Yes I see that. Killing off the demiurgic producer was a victory of spirit over flesh accomplished within the realm of the flesh, snuffing out the Snuffmaster if you will.
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“but TALKING about it is so pedestrian”
In Proust for Dummies I found out that Virginia Woolf, upon reading just some of Swann’s Way, was paralyzed by writerly inadequacy. I can never write that well, so why bother? was her attitude for years. She finally had to quit reading Proust in order to get on with her own writing. She still killed herself of course, but at least she got a few satisfying things done before taking the plunge. Continually watching/reading and evaluating others’ creative work can sometimes accelerate, sometimes hinder the creative urge. Okay, Porno Gang and Serbian Film are already in the can; good for them: now I must go my own way without comparing and contrasting and trying to outdo what’s already been done. (I’m sure Harman has already told us this tip many times.)
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Not sure I follow. I was exaggerating: Just because ‘Porno Gang’ is not likely as Olympian as ‘Serbian Film’ doesn’t, of course, mean it’s not worthy in many ways. But something that goes all the way, like the 9th Symphony of Beethoven, is still always going to be more monumental than Poulenc Flute Sonatas or Chabrier songs or god knows that one that everybody loves from ‘Les Six’, I love it I can’t remember her name right now. But all of it has its place, you know.
Virginia Woolf is a bad example of that, though, because she was a great writer by any standards, and just suffered severe clinical depression (I don’t know the details–and there is certainly nothing in ‘The Hours’ that enlightens you on ay of it— but ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ is a gorgeous book.)
So who’s that French composer that everybody just loves to get all cheap-melancholy about? It’s so tiresome, that stuff, when you get a lot more sense of loss-pleasure from Ravel. It’ll come to me in a minute.
I didn’t mean you shouldn’t discuss these 2 films. I meant that Serbian Film doesn’t have to talk about salvation–it’s butcher than that: It lets you figure out that maybe you wouldn’t want to do that personally, that it wouldn’t really be all that great to be ‘like a character in a great film’.
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“YOU who noticed in the Serbian Film that the annihilation and the hopelessness are life-affirming, which paradox is the whole subject of the conversation.”
NO! It was life-affirming because it doesn’t have to spell it out. On the surface, it’s not life-affirming at all, you have to have really been around the block like I have, to explain it to wyrmyrn who ‘can’t find where their cunts are located’, to quote your evil mind.
“Now you´re harping on some pedestrian adolescent rage related to your bimboid love affair with the hyperstitionists.”
That you will never be able to understand, that there is real pain involved, and I’d just as soon do without it. You can call it ‘paranoia’, but that’s not what it is. ‘lafayetc’, and therefore you, have not earned my good company.
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so therefore ‘Serbian Film’ is all frustration, it makes you feel the Whole Enchilada, and in this way, you are purged
Well exactly, the film as film, in content and performance, is of course nothing pure or edifying, but what it does to the viewer, is. It performs a damn good fleet entema on the viewer.
Eloise why are you constantly battling with the anal censor in your head and fretting pointlessly about ”to do art or not to do art” and being unable to make up your mind between analysis and creation like Richard Dreyfuss in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. If you want to do art, just do art.
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That you will never be able to understand, that there is real pain involved, and I’d just as soon do without it.
Whether I understand or not, fact is I can only be your PUSSY POSTMAN in this scenario. I mediate your angels and demons. Otherwise I might as well be dead. When I send you a laxative movie to ease your pain, you instantly start BITCHING. No doubt the same would happen if I sent a goddamn helicopter to take you to a Tahiti vacation with countless boyz at the ready. You’re just horrible, admit it.
And you’re upsetting Elosie, can’t you see SHE’S CRYING???
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No doubt the same would happen if I sent a goddamn helicopter to take you to a Tahiti vacation with countless boyz at the ready.
A helicopter can’t fly over that kind of ocean, but I promise I wouldn’t complain if you sent even a reasonable aircraft, rilly I wouldn’t.
I hadn’t noticed Eloise ‘crying’. What are you talking about? He just didn’t know what I meant about ‘Serbian Film’, Racine, and Graham (or that’s what I gathered–Va. Woolf thought she was inferior to Proust, but that’s not quite right, it’s just she thought it. On the other hand, Fannie Hurst is a good example, she’s definitely inferior to Proust.)
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I mediate your angels and demons. Otherwise I might as well be dead.
No, that’s not true. The problem is basically with ‘lafayetc’, who thinks she has some ‘right to her anonymity’, but she doesn’t. We’ve been through a lot over there, and it never bothered her, but it does bother me. So when she talks to me in emails to come back there, she is IMMEDIATELY HORRIBLE the minute I write the first posts, screaming PATRICK! I deleted that email account!
So, if I’m ‘horrible’, that’s beside the point, you let lafayetc get away with beastliness, because of your fear of abandonment (which you know she won’t do to you, but that I will if I’m treated like shit, and I was for a fucking long time. You’re just trying to act like a pitiful wermin.)
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I feel like shit, achy from head to toe, on the verge of some repetitive and annoying form of delirium, so I think I’ll go to bed.
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I didn’t mean you shouldn’t discuss these 2 films. I meant that Serbian Film doesn’t have to talk about salvation–it’s butcher than that: It lets you figure out that maybe you wouldn’t want to do that personally, that it wouldn’t really be all that great to be ‘like a character in a great film’.
You’re copping out of the main question which is are you ready to spend your vampiric eternity with or without a permanent hard-on ??? ARE YOU A TOP OR ARE YOU A WUSS??? This is about immortality, not death.
If you knew any history other than that time Tara fell to the Yanks you’d know that Serbs have always been at the forefront of revolutionary change – from Nikola Tesla to Gavrilo Princip – and are now spearheding the cinematic New Wave. Stuff like Porno Banda hasn’t been seen since Truffaut and Godard at least.
Eloise take some tea, vitamins, buy some flowers for the wife, get some rest and stop tormenting yourself with other-worldly ambitions. Start from the small, such as trying to write at least a paragraph a day without much thinking where it will take you, instead of dooming yourself to failure with self-defeating thoughts. If they come, buy a dildo for Christ’s sakes and start practising in the bathtub.
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“You’re copping out of the main question which is are you ready to spend your vampiric eternity with or without a permanent hard-on ??? ARE YOU A TOP OR ARE YOU A WUSS??? This is about immortality, not death. ”
As a confirmed bottom, you should know that you don’t determine as much as you think you do in your inverted way–which IS, to still the ‘magic penis’ from the big black mosquito-slapping cock, just like Arpege has described Zizek.
I’m not trying to be a ‘top’ to impress you. I’m whatever I feel like doing, but you do sound stoned. Both what you say to me and John this morning sounds quite demented, and a temporary drug state.
Your ridiculous talk about the Serbs and their superiority to literally everyone else is quite the turn-off, and I really think one Serbian film about fucking is enough. You should have sent this one to ‘lafayetc’, after all, you claim to know her real name because she wanted you to send her dvd’s. I’m sure that’s not true–she knows that I know that your number is really coarse and crude by now. The very idea you’d think I’d want to ‘prove myself’ to ‘have a permanent hard-on’. It’s not even a desirable goal by any means. But your Serb talk is very dull-edged by now.
Don’t know why John even puts up with it. Although I don’t think he’s upset. Jonathan Franzen’s new book ‘Freedom’ really does sound good, although the writer is very bratty in some of the things he wrote in one memoir a few years ago. Frank Rich wrote enough and well-enough about it in the Sunday paper, that I should read it. I just finished someone’s memoir, and possibly my ‘fan’ found out who that was, okay, that’s fine, he’s cute enough, I daresay–this memoir was much better-written than I would have expected, but I can’t talk about it at this point, as it’s related to the ‘secret movie’ that I mentioned (and which still has to remain secret.) Don’t you see how absurd it is to talk about ‘permanent hard-ons’ and ‘Eloise is CRYING’ on the computer? On your own blog, you tell lafayette, I ‘really don’t need Muffinz’s services any more’, so why don’t you just shut up, because you’re not going to get them under these appalling circumstances–circumstances in which you want to join once again with lafayette to inflict Serbian-Mladic style torture on me, and of course we all know that your bullshit about the Serbs’ innocence in literally all war crimes is just that, and we DON’T want to hear it. It’s like leninino and Arpege when they don’t want to hear about the recent stonings of ‘convicted adulterers and fornicators’ in Afghanistan, but just go ahead and blame the U.S. for things it didn’t even do (although Obama does seem to be weakening.)
Arpege wouldn’t post this, because she would say that both this and 9/11 were ‘not important’ compared to the general unpopularity of the proposed mosque near the World Trade Center–because she and leninino and Jodi as well would all see this as ‘systemic racism’ (which they now apply to Muslims as well as blacks, although she’s got tons of Jim Crow posts there too right now). This is typical, of course, but your position is little better, and it’s disgusting to see you trying to convince me to ‘prove myself’ to such as you and ‘lafayetc’ on a mere blog.
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John, Krugman is very good today: This is the best example of seen of someone really trying to make it simple enough for even the stupid to look just one step beyond the knee-jerk obvious, in regard to spending and austerity. Just ‘a little intellectual clarity’, that’s something I’ve written about as nearly impossible: It always takes something of a ‘Step 2’, and whole populations tend to shy away from that, whether it’s supporting the Tea Party types, or those who oppose the mosque, not realizing that American moderate Muslims are not dangerous, and in fact, make America seem as stupidly primitive as fundamental Islam of the Bin Laden sort. However, I just saw that there is a new $50 billion stimulus for transportation which should create jobs–the public is now without faith in the matter of unemployment, and in this way, the Republicans and Tea Partyers could come to power, cheered on by the likes of Jodi and Arpege, who always seem to prefer the overtly bad to the moderately bad (see Arpege’s idiot Squirrel cartoon, as if her Marxism had anything to offer most of the time except proclaiming how wonderful it is and how Wendy Brown is a ‘seriously bad person’ and Nina Power ‘utters a Zizekism in a little-girl voice’. It’s okay, but it’s just talk.)
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I god damn AM going to be a Serbian nationalist if it means defending sublime cinema. WHO in the world at the moment has such movies – name them, and I’ll fuck Satan’s ass in penance for my nationalism.
It’s quite another thing that the Serbian Film woke up the horny Dick Cheney goat sleeping in your Abama ™ polyesther fur coat, darling, so you can’t accept just to what edge of extremity it pushed you within just an hour or two of its running time. You were feeling pre-cum in your THROAT before you messed up that DVD player with a sea of sperm that could have borne Aphrodite, and you rewound Milos’s brother more times than Cher can remember changing goddamn WIGS. You don´t need any label on that DVD cause the semen encrusted the words ´´SERBIAN FILM´´ on it.
Now you´re ashamed of yourself, so you have to tell Eloise, suddenly, all about how ultimately you do support ABAMA and it´s those goddamn SERBS who are primitive rapists, not YOU, not that refined and humble pianist with a taste for Resnais.
Maybe Arpege likes this because it makes her feel more socialist to have a retarded right-wing brother from Manhat´n. But I know you better than she, Satan´s filthy whore!
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“with a taste for Resnais.”
Esp. since you wrote me an email oozing with thrillment about his most recent cinematic excursion, and said you were going to send me that dvd too. Well, save it, ‘Coeurs’ was a big bore and even Christian, super-bourgeois Swiss life-style, said ‘don’t take it too seriously’. I do remember that one of your freaks at CPC went on and on about this senile product, which has ‘Paris snowfalls’ as a recurring motif–a weird notion, that, since it comes across as if a cliche, and then you remember that ‘Paris snow’ isn’t really a cliche at all as in ‘I love Paris in the Springtime’, etc.
John, I may watch ‘Porno Gang’ at some point, I’m just in no rush to watch and endlessly analyze these Serbian films as if that was the only important thing in the world. I’ve got to go catch that filming of Martha Stewart’s show later this week, that will be inspiring, because she does 5, maybe 7, a week, and that means it will all be this super-professional process you’re seeing, and that’s always got its own hotness, like when I saw Rosemary Clooney at the Blue Note in 1987. Oh MAN, I had a bit too much red wine today, it was very ‘soft’, just as the guy at Willie’s told Jack, and went down a little too easy. I was annoyed that the fresh sage I got was bitter, so I had to strain the sauce I made for it, and get the solid parts out, as they tasted like chewing on some sort of weeds.
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“It’s quite another thing that the Serbian Film woke up the horny Dick Cheney goat sleeping in your Abama ™ polyesther fur coat, darling, so you can’t accept just to what edge of extremity it pushed you within just an hour or two of its running time. You were feeling pre-cum in your THROAT before you messed up that DVD player with a sea of sperm that could have borne Aphrodite, and you rewound Milos’s brother more times than Cher can remember changing goddamn WIGS. You don´t need any label on that DVD cause the semen encrusted the words ´´SERBIAN FILM´´ on it.”
You wonder if he means this sort of thing at all, since anybody knows I’d say I’d jerked off to a movie if I had, or if it had given me a hard-on. Just because I thought it was a great film and sexy doesn’t mean I thought it was something to jerk off to, and I didn’t. Once was enough. I should have known that this kind of reaction would have been predictable, so no, I won’t be watching the other film any time soon, as I am bored with this hyperbole. A great film is a great film, but I have no interest in talking to someone drunk on it. I have definitely seen greater films, but I won’t name them, because I do NOT get jouissance from this shit-arguing when the point has been made and it’s time for the drunks to be sent home. The problem, of course, is that I won’t take the blog seriously anymore, and once ensconced and immediately insulted by her partner and ‘top’, lafayetc, I had the largesse to write for a week and maybe more, that’s certainly more than was deserved in that hole. Has nothing whatever to do with Hyperstition, even if it used to–if your shit-ass there won’t identify herself, I have nothing to say. Period. End of report. I just am not interested to fulfill bleugers’ longings for a line from me to prove that I’m ‘stuck in the net’. Yes, I was, and from that, I got a book, but that’s not why I did that: I was naive, and that’s why I’m missed in the uncivilized bleugs (which is most of them), because I’d let myself be played with and imagine I was enjoying it. After awhile, it was obviously nowhere, and maybe, just maybe, Dejan can understand that that’s why somebody stops something so stupid. It was stupid enough that I did it as long as I did. But more? Forget it? Some rude creep like ‘lafayetc’ deserves you, and you alone. Be happy, he’s very faithful.
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retarded should be ´´reformed´´, although in essence I´m talkin´ bout the same thaing
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So Quantity, are you going to watch Porno Gang?
Obama’s first pile of infrastructure stimulus was spent less on roads and bridges in serious need of repair and more on minor upgrades in local politicians’ favorite districts. It would be a significant improvement if this new batch of money could be more carefully earmarked. But overall I say good for Obama in trying to juice up the public works projects. Your father was a paving contractor, was he not?
The point about Virginia Woolf was tangentially relevant to the point at hand, but more importantly it was something I had just read which I found worth reporting. It’s certainly possible that Woolf was already blocked before she read a word of Proust. The Proust for Dummies focused less on the novel and more on Marcel’s correspondences and friendships — interesting enough, but the Dear Abby tone to de Botton’s book is cloying if not entirely degueulasse.
I’ve been feeling better today, though as is usually the case I find myself relapsing a bit as the day wears on. I’m not quite ready for further forays into Serbian cinematic gnosticisms, but they do interest me and so I shall return to them.
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“being unable to make up your mind between analysis and creation”
You’ve probably noticed that, although I don’t often go in for freestanding cultural product interpretation, I do enjoy analytical discussions if someone else wants to get the ball rolling. You’re usually stimulating in this regard, pc, if at times prone to obsessive absorption in certain themes. Of course these obsessions contribute to your distinct interlocutionary charm, even if they do sometimes weary or irritate me. I suppose Lacan would say that the wearying irritation is also part of the jouissance I derive from these conversations: I guess he was a glass-half-full kind of guy.
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/’I suppose Lacan would say that the wearying irritation is also part of the jouissance I derive from these conversations: I guess he was a glass-half-full kind of guy.’
Oh, he wouldn’t like that, now would he? I hadn’t thought of that myself, given that he’s always ready for some new slaughter which passes as ‘going all the way’. He was clearly a masochist himself–certainly hadn’t thought of that till now either, and none too soon.
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because I do NOT get jouissance from this shit-arguing when the point has been made and it’s time for the drunks to be sent home.
I didn’t even START arguing, you bitch troll from Hell. You talked about the film and then the next day you started pulling at my eyes again about Lafayette, completely without reason and rhyme. With Eloise I had a separate discussion about the Gnosticism, but then you want to pull me apart on THAT ONE as well because YOU think the discussion is not worth having and you prefer to discuss chicken biscuits dipped in testicle tjap tjoy in between snippets from the New York Times. But since you brought it up again, I stand behind my words that Western cinema doesn’t have anything even remotely similar to this to offer at the moment, surely a consequence of the fact that the imperial core is so full of shit they’ve imported from the colonies that they’re now completely devoid of content and gagging on their pointless greed. Precisely the way both Serbian films depict the Empire, as a bunch of impotent voyeurs. But no you don’t have to watch, I just won’t send any more DVDs. Then you can have more time for smearing French champignon pate on the butts of the Albanian rent boyz you’ll be brutalizing down at the COCKRING club.
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Hey PC,
I just listened to this guy’s review of A Serbian Film. It’s pretty good for his initial thoughts.
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Thanks NB, there’s almost nothing in the review (he did get the main point that the film serves as a kind of a litmus paper for British Puritans) and he makes some material mistakes, like the idea that Milosh is in poverty – he isn’t, but as one character puts it his reserves will wear off in the long run (like all our reservers in neoliberal capitalism) – and besides the most important aspect to the story is that he DOESN’T do it for the money, but for the thrill. Besides in the by now tedious discussion of the baby fucking he forgets to mention that the baby fucking isn’t at all new in cinema history, it has a long tradition in B-horror for example. Grade B- but exemplary though that he’s defending the film as a work of art, which it is.
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Uh, I never saw a B-movie with baby fucking. But there you go. Is there some subgenre I don’t know about? I remember some babes being thrown into the fire by Satan in Haxan…
I still haven’t seen it yet, but I have downloaded it. Just haven’t had time yet. I had understood that Milos did do it for financial security, as far as the plot point goes (I’m sure there are stronger thematic reasons). Security being the operative word. He’s not poor, but neither is he totally secure (something that everyone lusts after in our super-capitalist world. Have you bought your EuroMillions lotto ticket yet?). Does the director seem to come from a different class, as the reviewer says? I mean, he’s certainly a visionary, a bit of a Napoleon, or Mengele.
It seems this guy just put the review together not long after seeing the film, so I think it’s a pretty good effort at analysis/defence, especially on YouTube so far. Maybe not more than B-, but it’s a first stab. Also, his concentration on the child/baby thing seems close to his heart because this is probably one of the major reasons Serbian Film will be massively censored here. I mean, I think he’s probably right that it’s not actually as visually explicit as other films that get passed with no or very few cuts. He wants to say that this film is more than just baby fucking, but he has to talk about it (to the English, I guess) to do so. He seems pretty pissed off by censorship generally because I also noticed today that he’s done loads of reviews on video nasties. There were a lot of crap films that were designated nasties in the UK but there were also some gems that just got lumped in (not that any of them should have been banned anyway). In fact, I think Salo was banned here under the scare.
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Well, save it, ‘Coeurs’ was a big bore and even Christian, super-bourgeois Swiss life-style, said ‘don’t take it too seriously’.
I haven’t seen ‘Coeurs’ but this one is a return to the style of ‘Marienbad’ you could even see it as a sequel of sorts, and it’s phenomenal. But I’m not going to send it because you don’t have time, you have to make chicken breast biscuits for Childie.
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Security being the operative word. He’s not poor, but neither is he totally secure (something that everyone lusts after in our super-capitalist world. Have you bought your EuroMillions lotto ticket yet?). Does the director seem to come from a different class, as the reviewer says? I mean, he’s certainly a visionary, a bit of a Napoleon, or Mengele.
Yes he does it ostensibly to make his family secure, because his reserves will wear off, but down the line you realize he does it, as the director puts it, because he liked ”that time he got sucked off by a mongoloid through a glory hole he made in the microwave owen”, which is a kind of a blackly-humorous clue to the relentless Lacanian Drive or Deleuzian affect which drives Milosh, and the whole film, towards its curiously life-affirming attitude (and I just hate to admit that only Bitchness understood this point of all the people who have so far discussed the film on the net).
The whole world of underground elite snuff being depicted doesn’t exist in Serbia, and we also don’t have such affluent maffia (unlike the Ruskies). The scene is deliberately modelled after Western movies in order to be more accessible to this market, but more importantly, because this is a way of saying that foreign Capital is pulling the strings.
As for the director, I sent the article of a Serbian cultural theorist about the film, and he made a number of convincing points about him as the Demiurge in a Gnostic conspiracy plot. But I don’t think we can talk about this until you have seen the film.
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Quoting from a Serbian reviewer:
Anti-baby violence has a long tradition on screen, from the scene of the Black Sabbath in the classic HAXAN WITCH by B. Christensen (1922) across baby slaughter for Satanic purposes by Christopher Lee in TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER (1975) to the zombie babies being kicked around left to right in Pete Jackson’s BRAINDEAD (1995) and countless other Troma-style direct-to-DVD horrors (e.g. FEAST 2) which truthfully deploy this for splatter-camp purposes (…) but whether gag or socially meaningful, baby is by no means a protected species in film.
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It’s the same “curiously life-affirming attitude” we see in zombie movies: mindless insatiable cannibalistic drive.
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Well, I’ve seen all these films, apart from Feast 2, and in none of them are babies fucked to death. I think the reviewer is glossing just a bit. Braindead is indeed hilarious in its abuse of the zombie child. And that babe certainly ain’t innocent. (Ah, if only they could take all the money away from Peter Jackson, he might start making decent films again.) There are plenty of Spielberg films in which children are put into jeopardy. There were quite a few baby death jokes in the playground when I was a kid (something to do with a food mixer, I seem to remember). But it’s not the violence, it’s the sex. We’re not British puritans for nothing, you know!
It’s funny, because I always saw Lacan as a kind of Gnostic demiurge. All that misfiring. A-ha!
“If it turns out that there IS a God, I don’t think that He’s evil. I think that the worst you can say about Him is that basically He’s an underachiever.”
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It’s the same “curiously life-affirming attitude” we see in zombie movies: mindless insatiable cannibalistic drive.
Well, no; I’m talking about the anger that spills out of every pore of SF, anger at the systematic rape of Serbia, and places like Serbia, which then results in the kind of ripples as the recent banning at the British festival. This is not something that happens on the level of the film’s gruesome content, but what the film does in its interaction with the environment.
The baby scene has a religious connotation, which indeed isn’t present in any of those other films mentioned: it is suggested that the mother is happy in the knowledge that the baby will be raped. It is shot as some kind of a baptism. This figures because the baby is being born into the Demiruge’s evil world, where all of us in the position of getting fucked. In this sense it also has an exquisite black sense of humor.
But what your reviewer, NB, noticed very well, is that in fact there is little in this film more graphic than any ole Tarantino production, people seem to react more to what is being hinted at, or perhaps unconsciously reacting to THE TRUTH they sense in the film’s blunt telling of the fact that there are no morals left other than use value on the Market.
This is what’s subversive about it: it allows you to feel very uncomfortable about what official society deems to be ”moral”.
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I am pasting the original snippet from the article by a Serbian (apparently theologically inclined reviewer), which I had previously sent to John
If Serbian movie, in terms of genre, is dominated by elements of thriller and melodrama, pornography is treated as a de-sacralized genre, in “reverse”, ie as a Luciferian order form which it establishes the genre in the original meaning of the term. The victory of pornography in the film is that they were able to film “a shocking film about pornography, without a single scene that would, by definition, be called pornographic.” Pornographers here, as in today’s festival-multiplex reality, usurp the right to define the meaning of the film: while the one-eyed driver-bodyguard has a striking tattoo on his neck in the form of film tape, porn producer and director Vukmir Vukmir (Sergej Trifunovic) equates pornography with art, advocating for the unity of art and life through the “naked art, truth, real people , minimum installation, where pornography, then art, then the movie, “must be an illusion, it must be a direct recording.” Sacrificial, eucharistic meaning, the meaning of art is reversed to show “the life of a victim” (“It’s not porn, that’s life, the life of a victim” – Vukmir), and the only purpose is to create a “new genre”, a new form of film that stops being a film in any previous sense of the word – “newborn porn, a porn film that shows sex with a newborn baby”. So this is not simply creating a new genre among others, but a new understanding of the genre, a creative and form-giving process, art itself. Vukmir, “child psychologist from State Security, with a strong international background, who pulls the hero Milos (Srdjan Todorovic), a pensioned porn star (” Balkan sex god “), into his obscene plans, is initially understood only as artist-philosopher, unmistakably embodies the flip Luciferian side of contemporary art, faced with an unprecedented spiritual crisis, occult-conspiracy games and moneys of dubious origin. In the spirit of true dandyism, the authors discover in the snobbish, Euro-Atlantic pseudodemocracy of many modern artists and “public employees” not only meanness, but also something much worse. In The Serbian film, conversely, as Nikolaj Berđajev (Berdâev) puts it in Uismans (Huysmans), “there is no trace of vulgar platitudes, flippant superficiality and the bourgeoisism of the modernist spirit, the false hipness of modern art and style (which lacks style).”
Though the characters in the movie are constantly monitored by handheld cameras, with numerous carriers and sources of images, as a totally mobile phone recording, Serbian film was shot very scrupulously, by a refined, “old-fashioned” film process, keeping the identity of each frame and each character, respecting their form and sign and their artistic meaning. Each scene, even those with rape babies, which caused the most controversy even before anyone saw the movie, is precisely contextualised in terms of the narrative and its meaning, without moralism and didactics, and also, no evil “pornographic” relativism. The tension between the characters’ ”human-Godly and “Godly-human ” is achieved by a dynamism that does not allow unambiguous ethical judgment, much less enjoyment in evil. The author’s sense of responsibility is therefore almost conservative,the film is not “a live experiment”, but was made with full awareness of the effect that their work should and can produce, with almost traditional “knowledge” and concern about the impact on viewers as integral personalities.
Just as Marquis de Sade creates a new language in a time of the supremacy of the epistolary and the diary, low form models, and unwilling to return to the past, with its outdated, fictional forms, so, facing the lack of genre continuity in his country, and the global dominance of low-level models, the authors of Serbian film, purely out of their love for film and using their right to make fiction, create a new language, which speaks about the now, but not as the language of destruction, rather as the language of creativity, not the language of tautology but the language of metaphors. The language of this movie is based on metaphorization, modelization, semioticizing the elements of “pornographic” art, transforming and “redeeming” them in an overall process of reshaping the art. This particularly comes into play in the second part of the film, especially fragmented and frequently using flashbacks, which reaches a level of simultaneity and multiperspectivity that is rarely seen in contemporary art. This proves that the film does not reject new forms but thinks them through. What most modern films achieve by destroying form, Serbian film achieves by its improvement to increasing levels of transformation power and abstraction.
The temptations of pornography in this film are the temptations of the world, and the authors’ relationship to the world is not eucharistic, but as with most decadents, mostly Gnostic. So, it seeks more liberation from the world, than its salvation, destruction of substance rather than its renewal in Resurrection. A number of symbolic art images in the film point to this: the “antique” torso in Vukmir’s house, the floor tiled in black and white plates, the mock Eucharist, and the purple sunset at the peak of an unimaginable horror, as the hope for an agent communicating with a true deity, that couldn’t have created this world, but who may hear our cry and bring us in its wing, away from the “body of death.” This purple also conjures the mediating and indisputably Gnostic idea of Sofia, the dominant religion in the Russian Silver-century philosophy: “It is God’s purple dawn, breaking in the midst of the darkness of non-existence. It is the eternal sun rising over the matter. “Above all, the ending of the film with its structure evokes the image of the maze, a” dual-axis” BIOS which is given by the law of the Earth’s motion on its axis and the sun and its movement along with the Sun around the center of the galaxy, thus labyrinth of the world and life, but also, of duality, whose outcome is not in the mechanics of material but in the mechanics of spirit, and by whose overcoming we raise to a new level of existence, which might seem to us like death at the moment, but about which we do not and cannot know anything. This is a film about silence and the absolute ignorance of death before death: “There’s nothing there. Vain hope. You will not even encounter the Beast in this evil dawn, standing there in the midst of death as an idiot “.
This bold, interesting and moving film, one of the best in Serbian cinema, reaches as far as you can without a consciousness of the Eucharist and the Resurrection, that is, as far as the human measure reaches. Only from the liturgical perspective, where differences between dogmatics and moral ethos disappear, and the ethos of a man is united with the ethos of God and the ethos of the community, can this become an ethical problem.
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Wow, that is a very involved and rather confusing – analysis of the film. I’ll have to watch SF first and read it again.
“The victory of pornography in the film is that they were able to film “a shocking film about pornography, without a single scene that would, by definition, be called pornographic.””
Surely that’s a good thing about the film, and not a victory of pornography…? (Unless he’s talking about the victory of porn as the subject of the film)
This guy seems to celebrate what he sees as the unified moral stance of the film, even if he’s a little alienated by the makers’ Gnostic decadence, and this is what takes it beyond the “vulgar platitudes, flippant superficiality and the bourgeoisism of the modernist spirit, the false hipness of modern art and style (which lacks style)” of the “Euro-Atlantic pseudodemocracy of many modern artists and public employees” (lovin’ that phrase!).
“Pornographers here, as in today’s festival-multiplex reality, usurp the right to define the meaning of the film: while the one-eyed driver-bodyguard has a striking tattoo on his neck in the form of film tape, porn producer and director Vukmir Vukmir (Sergej Trifunovic) equates pornography with art, advocating for the unity of art and life through the “naked art, truth, real people , minimum installation, where pornography, then art, then the movie, “must be an illusion, it must be a direct recording.'”
Does this mean Vukmir is not a pronographer? It’s difficult to know what he’s saying here.
I agree with this guy in so far as aesthetics are not ethics. Life and art are not the same, even if they partake of each other. I tend to think, in a kind of sub-Freudian way, that ethics are born from aesthetics. But ethics cannot by justified by aesthetics, in the same way as one’s actions cannot be justified by an appeal to the beautiful or to the parent, to the Father. This is what Nietzsche got wrong, in my opinion, although I think he also sort of realised that. Aesthetics primarily involves a relationship to enjoyment, or “jouissance” if you want. Hence, Vukmir’s art porn or porny pop-culture like tweenager fashion. Ethics come in when you (at least try to) remove the enjoyment or, at least, try and recognise its injustice. Of course, that removal can perversely (in the Lacanian sense) become another enjoyment: the British puritan looking for another law to employ.
It’s the libinal aspect you mentioned before that has got this film into trouble, at least in the UK. Evil can be enjoyed. The enjoyment stands in for ethics. Where SF excels, according to what you have said about it, is in showing that that enjoyment is the ethics of a social superstructure.
Perhaps this is why Kubrick put a self-imposed ban on A Clockwork Orange in the UK. The other side to the puritan’s enjoyment of law is the British thug’s enjoyment of teenage kicks (to the head). Brits on the piss! Yeaaah! They’re both driven by libido.
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There’s an amusing sketch by two British comedians dressed as SS officers on patrol. One of them says to the other tentatively:
“You know our uniforms?”
“Yeah, what about them?”
“Well, the way we wear black and have skull and crossbones on our hats and all that…”
“Yeah?”
“Are we the bad guys?”
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The victory of pornography in the film is that they were able to film “a shocking film about pornography, without a single scene that would, by definition, be called pornographic.””
That’s not even certain, there’s definitely some real cocksucking, who did it doesn’t matter, that’s a pornographic ‘scene’, no matter how short, just as Guillaume and Yakatarina fucking (or someone else) in ‘Pola X’. It proves nothing, nothing at all, ‘real porno’ is just as appropriate as ‘suggested porno’ in a film.
The ‘victory of porno’ is that it’s a porno film primarily because it celebrates the libido no matter what it’s up to, by using the most gruesome images to suppress it, as it were, and this doesn’t stop it either. It’s also a legitimate ‘mainstream-type film’ that is a continuation of ‘Last Tango in Paris’ (maybe the first, and there haven’t been many) and the other courageous films that have proven that we should be much more often prone to fucking in public, and that we should do so. Okay, you don’t, I do. I didn’t learn that from this film, that’s why I understood the film and Dejan was afraid to admit she understood it as ‘attractive’ until I said so. What she’s totally fucked up about is that the film is the ONLY thing someone should be thinking about, and that being a BOTTOM is writing in her vile bleug! They are not the same things. I discussed the fucking film with her, and I’m not interested in it forever. There are other things to do in life.
“I agree with this guy in so far as aesthetics are not ethics. Life and art are not the same, even if they partake of each other. I tend to think, in a kind of sub-Freudian way, that ethics are born from aesthetics. But ethics cannot by justified by aesthetics, in the same way as one’s actions cannot be justified by an appeal to the beautiful or to the parent, to the Father. This is what Nietzsche got wrong, in my opinion, although I think he also sort of realised that. Aesthetics primarily involves a relationship to enjoyment, or “jouissance” if you want. Hence, Vukmir’s art porn or porny pop-culture like tweenager fashion. Ethics come in when you (at least try to) remove the enjoyment or, at least, try and recognise its injustice. Of course, that removal can perversely (in the Lacanian sense) become another enjoyment: the British puritan looking for another law to employ.”
That’s a bit of a convoluted mess, now isn’t it? I imagine if Dominic were to be able to watch this film (I doubt he would, since he wouldn’t watch Antichrist for ‘gruesome-image reasons’, I wouldn’t watch it because it sounded dreadful, and Von Trier making statements about America without having ever been here goes against my belief in Place–that attitude stinks). Yes, aesthetics from ethics, but they ‘don’t come in till you try to remove the enjoyment’, which really doesn’t even bear repeating, as yes, what really gets proved here is the ‘sustained British puritan’ (the American is little different when it comes to these matters.)
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Eloise didn’t you recently write about symbolic poets or was that my wrong impression? In the further pages of the text above, the author situates the makers of SF in the ”decadence” group of poets, which includes ”snobbists, dandyists and camp”; plenty of mention is made of Baudellaire as well. This group of poets sees as its primary task the creation of a new language; they take the processes of ”semiotization” and ”aestheticization” to their extreme until no possibility of any binary reading remains, only multiple meaning.
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I love a good zombie movie, even when I’m not consciously thinking about the zombies’ symbolic function in late capitalism. Presumably the zombies are enraged at having been reduced to the consumerist drive. Their political-economic rage is expressed in a hyperbolized, accelerationistic form of the very exploitation which enrages them, and so we get both the grotesque horror and the manic glee of the zombie movie. So too with the Serbian Movie I’d say.
Yes I did recently write a post quoting Huysmans on the poets of the decadence. He compared late 19th-century France to the decline of the Roman Empire, except that the contemporary decadence was happening during the height of French culture and not after centuries of slow deterioration. Huysmans valued the idiosyncratic over the great, the forbidden pleasure over the conservatory, intoxication over control. There’s the sense not of abandoning the traditions of the old cultural language, but of intensifying them, fermenting them, distilling them to their essence, then getting drunk on them.
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How about some kabbalistic gnosticism:
The Qliphoth are negative or entropic beings in the universe, and are the opposite of the positive or kaotic beings known as the Sephiroth. The Hebrew root word “qlippah” or “klippah” (plural “qlippoth”) means “shell” or “husk”. Some consider the Qliphoth to be, quite simply, the spirits of the dead, but this is not the case. They may consist of the spiritual energy obtained from either the living, or the dead, and encase themselves in the lighter, etheric shell-bodies of the dead, but they are not the actual Souls of the dead. They are, of course, the entropic, unnatural force in the Universe which drives people towards death, self-destruction, and suffering, because this is what the Qliphoth craves as food.”
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You mean they’re like beings from HP Lovecraft?? Cool.
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Or the more traditional Christian variant:
Gnosticism is a dualistic theological system. God is all good and the source of all goodness. Everything spiritual is of God and therefore good. Light too is of God and therefore good. Equal to God but diametrically opposed is the devil who is evil and the source of all evil. Everything material is of the devil and therefore evil. Darkness too is of the devil and therefore evil.
Regarding creation, the Gnostics rejected Christian teaching. Instead, they posited that a series of aeons emanate from God in descending order. These aeons are paired, being called “syzygies,” in almost a male-female sense: so the aeons depth and silence produce mind and truth, which produce reason and life, which produce man and state. All together they form the pleroma. As these aeons recede from God, they become less perfect. The last aeon, the Demiurge, creates the material world due to some flaw, sin or passion.
Man is created, but because of some primordial fault, his soul has fallen to this world and is imprisoned in the physical body. While his physical being is corrupt, his spiritual soul is good. In a sense, the good soul is the prisoner of the evil body; therefore, redemption is to release the soul from its bodily prison. To release the soul necessitates awakening the “gnosis,” (the wisdom) within, a gnosis which “has fallen asleep” in physical matter.
According to the Gnostics, individuals fall into three categories: the pneumatikoi are influenced by the spirit, have the necessary gnosis, and are assured salvation; the psychikoi may be saved; and the hylikoi are so influenced by matter that they have no hope of salvation.
This teaching impacted their morality. On one hand, since material things were considered evil, many Gnostics refrained from eating meat, marriage and conjugal love (because one would not want to imprison another soul). On the other hand, since a person who had the gnosis and was under the influence of the spirit was assured salvation, some Gnostics lived licentious lives of debauchery.
In the end, universal salvation will come when the pneumatikoi achieve redemption, the Demiurge is conquered and the material world destroyed.
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And this one is like the Church of Scientology, I mean Synthiotics, Catharism, Christian and Islamic Fundamentalism and Calvinism.
And Tom Cruise is a pneumatikoi. Who indulges in a licentious life of debauchery. KSW!
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“I mean Synthiotics”
hahaha, if you desire only to be rude (if you want to tease and flirt, that’s no better than the Vegas-y PUA}, go and observe the sacrifices of gnosticism. You’ve certainly earned at least that. They’re all there, and that ‘Course in Miracles’ is definitely an insane Gnostic text, the stupid cunt. After all that ‘there is no death’ shit, she promptly ‘dies’. I asked one of the fanatics of this cult ‘why did she die then?’ the answer ‘well, she just died’. The ‘course’, which calls itself ‘a required course’, says the ‘body doesn’t grow old or ever even die, its purpose is simply fulfilled and it is gently laid by’. You can’t find more stupid shit than that, and Oprah loved it.
Gnosticism seems little different from orthodox Christianity at the bottom of it–or any of the other organized religions. You just adhere to the ones that seem to be working for you, and sometimes you ‘believe them’ and try to ‘live by their tenets’, sometimes the most established and traditional ones seem more useful if you don’t find any of them that believable as such.
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Now it came about, when men began to multiply on face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of gods saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. Then Yahweh said, “My spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; his days will be a hundred and twenty years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of gods came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children by them. Those were the mighty men of old, men of renown.
– Genesis 6:1-4
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Gnosticism is a dualistic theological system. God is all good and the source of all goodness. Everything spiritual is of God and therefore good. Light too is of God and therefore good. Equal to God but diametrically opposed is the devil who is evil and the source of all evil. Everything material is of the devil and therefore evil. Darkness too is of the devil and therefore evil.
So as I told you before the Christian Orthodox church condemns this as a heresy because matter is portrayed as bad. Nothing bad can come out of a perfect God. By shutting matter out and with it the world, the Gnostics are busy with a narcissistic project of self-reflection. There is no involvement with God without an involvement with the world. It’s not that the Orthodox church explains howso matter is good; it is spoken of a mysterious ie inexplicable unity of body and soul in Christ. Hence this isn’t something one could access by philosophizing.
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All the main branches of Christianity condemn gnosticism as heresy. Gnosticism was the main dispute within the church prior the East-West, Orthodox-Catholic split. Though the gnostics were purged, we know about the return of the repressed. Orthodox iconography and theosis show strong gnostic influence. I’d say Paul was pretty gnostically inclined himself, with his whole flesh-spirit internal warfare and his praxis of dying to self so that the inner Christ could shine through. Paul says that man inherits corruption through Adam, but Christ is the second Adam and through his death we die to our old fleshly nature and take on Christ’s spiritual nature. Etc. Through purification and knowledge man becomes an avatar of the gods: it’s implicit in Pauline theology. Psychoanalysis is gnostic, with its jousts against the demiurgic Oedipus and the Name of the Father and the Big Other and so on. Analysis is a gnostic praxis of enlightenment in which the unconscious god speaks through us, so that by becoming channels of the Real we attain pneumatikoi status.
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Gnosticism seems little different from orthodox Christianity at the bottom of it–or any of the other organized religions. You just adhere to the ones that seem to be working for you, and sometimes you ‘believe them’ and try to ‘live by their tenets’, sometimes the most established and traditional ones seem more useful if you don’t find any of them that believable as such.
What a wonderful Reader’s Digest wisdom there. You just ‘believe a little’ you ‘live by it a little’ and then ‘you die a little’. But all the time, you’re having all these great cakes and your wallpaper is impeccable. Darling, I am no passionate believer in organized religion, but I have never dared to say that there is no God. What if I end up over the Rainbow some day and it turns out that there IS a God.
Eloise I’m still no wiser about this problem. You can stretch the ‘Gnostic’ considerably (in Wilson’s book, all kinds of things fall under Gnosis, including kabala and alchemy). And much as I believe that no single product of the human mind is without its insights and merits, there must be some finite point where you say ‘this just isn’t true’. Otherwise the universe would be a disorganized mess just like the Egyptian Temptress’s vagina.
Bitchness reading your account of the Stewart I remembered what I definitely didn’t like about the States, and that was the feeling at Universal studios that you’re constantly hoarded and goaded into doing something. If you don’t smile or experience joy on cue, they almost want to make you pay another ticket. The States struck me then as a very Communist country, because this is exactly what you get in Russia as well – this mass organization of optimism.
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NB I have to apologize for the (indeed) confusing nature of the text; it is not my translator’s mistake, but the original text, it is written in the manner of a lithurgical diatribe, in a kind of an old-fashioned poetic way. I found myself not understanding the same points you mention, but because I also read the remaining 10 pages which I didn’t have time to translate, I know that what he means is that the authors have used the tropes of pornography to non-pornographic ends. he draws a distinction between pornography as something that basically exploits (existing worlds and images), and pornographic art (which is also something like my own personal ambition), as something that creates a new language. he refers to the poets of french symbolism to draw a parallel, and he mentions de sade and jenet (I agree with both these references).
vukmir in this scenario would be the pornographer, someone who tries to exploit, but i think milos is the artist here because he has that constantly hard cock. to the extent that this cock stands for the Lacanian Drive (not: libido in the Freudian sense) – an energetic field that does not choose any objects and always gets satisfied – it manages to evade the dialectic of desire which runs pornography and capitalism. and milos’s drive, his anger, is exactly that part of the film that hits you (the second half of the film).
You said:
Where SF excels, according to what you have said about it, is in showing that that enjoyment is the ethics of a social superstructure.
This part you can ascribe to Pasolini’s SALO, where the fascists hold the license of pleasure: noone else may enjoy. But as I explain above, there is no enjoyment in Serbian Film. Perhaps the only enjoyable sex is with the innocent baby. Everything else is for domination and submission. From this you see that the libido, the driving force, is not desire, but the Drive.
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To release the soul necessitates awakening the “gnosis,” (the wisdom) within, a gnosis which “has fallen asleep” in physical matter
The GNOSIS is another issue. The church says it is vanity, because only intelligent people can then know God, people who possess a special knowledge. But in Porno Banda, you see that innocents get saved: people without much knowledge.
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“What if I end up over the Rainbow some day and it turns out that there IS a God. ”
that will be just fine with me. I’m not concerned with your particular destiny. I already had to explain everything to you, you’re that stupid. You said Eloise and NB hadn’t realized fully understood Serbian Film, and ‘even you’ were afraid to admit it. But the film can also be interpreted as Werminist: Milos, unlike me, will go back into a scene without any idea of what it offers him–in this scene, he is your ‘Bottom’, even though he’s still got the Cock. But the rest can have at least some revenge on him. I went back briefly to CPC, only to find that you and lafayette are the same low-class assholes that you always seemed to be. You were looking for the same games as before, and you thought ‘all it really will take is to get him started again, just get his foot in the door’. Et alors? Yes, for one week, till I found out what totally worthless pigs you are, without a single redeeming quality. Liars, cheats, you name it. And screaming because I won’t listen to your other DVD on your asshole schedule. I think I won’t watch it for several months, and you can discuss all your mystical bullshit with Eloise and NB till you all ROT.
“reading your account of the Stewart I remembered what I definitely didn’t like about the States, and that was the feeling at Universal studios that you’re constantly hoarded and goaded into doing something. If you don’t smile or experience joy on cue, they almost want to make you pay another ticket. The States struck me then as a very Communist country, because this is exactly what you get in Russia as well – this mass organization of optimism.”
Well, you would think something like that, even though it was very comfortable and they did nothing of the sort. What they did was no different from TV has been from its very beginnings, with blinking lights for applause and using laugh tracks. There was someone, a child who did get sick early on, they stopped the proceedings, even though they told us we couldn’t leave our seats during the filming, but when an emergency occurred they did do so, and there were emergency exits pointed out at the very beginning. It had nothing to do with ‘mass organization of optimism’, but since you didn’t get to go, you have to find something to make it look like Arpege would have seen it. If you go to Martha Stewart Show looking for Bertolt Brecht, then you might as well go to jail. Everybody was treated extremely courteously, and they don’t make you pay for a single thing, even give out lots of books and gifts in the audience, and everybody got one of those Martha Stewart Living Magazines, even if they FROWNED the whole time–yeah, not but $4.99 on the newsstand, but you’ll appreciate sums like that, but it hadn’t been necessary at all. Sure, her outfit is superrich, and she had been on the board of the New York Stock Exchange before she got caught misbehaving, but that doesn’t mean all wealthy outfits bother with being gracious. But–glad you weren’t there, that’s all I can say. You’re vile and vicious.
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Here is the rest of the translation:
Given the clear roots of Serbian film (directed by Srdjan Spasojevic, 2010) in the poetics of decadence and the controversy sparked by the film, both at home and abroad, with serious threats of judicial bans and seizure of recorded material, this film is a good occasion to review certain modelization and ethical aspects of art theory and art.
While the idea of art as a model dates back to Aristotle’s understanding of concepts and mimesis mithos, based on the cognitive and ontological separation between the physis and the technical, critical for the formation of the basic categories of Western culture, concepts and modelizations today are mostly associated with the meanings given to them within Russian structural semiotics , with an emphasis on the work of Yuri Lotman (Lotman). As meta-linguistic structure, work of art is a second instance of the modelization system, a model (French form, mold) can be simply defined as an analogue of an object if and when in the process of knowledge it takes the role of the object itself. ” The model, therefore, serves as the deputy object, and ”since art gets to know life by reshaping it”, this provides “the opportunity to interpret one the basic features of art – knowledge by reshaping – as the phenomenon of modeling. Art thereby has a great modelization power: “The ability of art to access the most complex object models and relationships, that with the help of any other assets could not be known, puts a special stamp on the nature of models in art.” Art is therefore a privileged and powerful tool for the cognitive structuring of reality, overcoming of entropy and chaos, through the possibility of a unique interaction of the whole and its parts, in accordance with modern energy developments and the information science paradigm based on synergetics, quantum-holographic paradigms and fractal theory; mapping infinitely complex reality in a regulated system with a finite number of elements and their mutual relations”, it is actually modeling.
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“you can discuss all your mystical bullshit with Eloise and NB till you all ROT.”
This might make a good animated short; we could even discuss the meaning of our own putrescence until we finally melt into a pool of fetid and (blessedly) silent goo.
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Maybe take a Svankmajer approach: the goo continually reshapes itself into the discussants, only to collapse again, etc. etc. in an eternal return. Sort of like the end of Serbian Film: there is no end.
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The Mimetic tradition, to which the theory of modelization belongs, rests on an acceptance of the world of the techna, i.e. man’s ability to use skill, craft, and art, based on reason (fronesis) and ability of building, creation (poiesis), and thereby participate in the truth. Similar to the ancient understanding of theory, art is thus far from just passive observation and copying of some fixed reality, truth, or life, but a dynamic process of learning, participation in the observed reality, a transformative activity which doesn’t just show its object and points to it, but gives the possibility of expressing the truth of the object itself, such as could not have existed without the creative process that spawned it, but which is also, in a way, synchronous to it. In defiance of rationalism and the metaphysic cult of authenticity, characterized by a faith in reaching truth by human reason, the mimetic tradition, pointing to the importance of art to human life, focuses attention on the creation process itself ,the building of the artwork, as an energetic and practical deed which considerably transcends Descartes’s concept of subject-object, cancelling out the belief in an absolute truth defined by man, but without renouncing the privilege of seeking out truth.
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I will continue the translation tomorrow, I first have to tell the DICK CHENEY HOG that I don’t care what she says, because she will always come back to my Dungeon, to exercise her profound masochism with Lafayette or whatever stand-on of Nick Land happens to be hanging around at my place.
So these hissings merely sound like Marlene threatening to break the contract even if she knows well that it supplies her BOOZE.
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“to exercise her profound masochism with Lafayette or whatever stand-on of Nick Land happens to be hanging around at my place.”
That’s the best, and even worth waiting for–you make it easy to stay out with such shit. I don’t want a ‘stand-on of Nick Land’ or even the ‘real Nick Land’. I obviously once thought I did, and you still insist I do–that’s not because you really still think it, but since I can hardly avoid you even if I do stay out of there, it’s true, he’d be the only reason to go back in there. But if he’s nothing but a shit, no, that’s the way you like to be treated, not me. And it’s very easy to treat you like shit.
When I went there for the week this time, I didn’t think the ‘lafayette’ was Nick Land, but I didn’t know he’d then just prove to be quite the same kind vermin as Nick Land is. So it’s your turn to find out about the ‘Great Man Nick Land’, I saw that Mrs. Fisher is promising a podcast of her, Mrs. Mackay, Mrs. Brassier, and maybe there’ll be even a guest appearance from the laboratories of Urbanatomy with Mr. and Mrs. Greenspan sitting around their cold-world hearths. I’m sure Dominic would not want to miss this, as he’s written me “Christ, Patrick, the company you keep”, but has been told in no uncertain terms that I do not exactly thing kpunk and Mrs. Nymphomania are The Social Register. He’s a little more interesting than the rest, more talented and better-looking, but I don’t trust him any more than the rest of you FREAKS!
Anyway, you tried to get information out of me (using Eloise as ‘legitimacy’) and failed to do so, either on email or bleug. In the old days, I would have told you (or at least emailed Eloise.) I won’t now. I know TRUE insanity when I run into it, and when people write a letter to me and then send it to other parties (without asking me), as if I will then automatically cooperate with their fucked-up scheme, and want other endless legal numbers done, it becomes clear who’s lying. But I already told you you could probably find that out on your own. If you do, that’s just marvelous, but you’ll get no cooperation out of me.
As for you and lafayesitsmenickland, I will see that as ‘The Continuing Adventures of Vermin and Wermin’ (I know that, since you want her as a husband, and I wanted her as a wife, you are now proud to show off your revenge, even though you pretended to be in love with the beer-bellied OOO person.) But he won’t ever tell you anything about his ‘real life’ either, because he was never interested in you to begin with, he just thought I’d cooperate with him endlessly. As someone with a family, he probably is forced to deal with that all the time, although he’s a nerd too (and has always admitted it), but you don’t mind that. Just so long as your bleug stats keep coming in. Why don’t you slip over to London early next week and meet all these people? It’ll be just like being with your bleug-partner.
I will say one thing for him: He doesn’t follow me everywhere the way you do. Although NB is certainly no prize either, and is clearly involved with them, etc., has merely tried to improve his manners slightly out of respect to Eloise. WHO GIVES A FUCK.
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She’s just trying to raise her salary.
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Weaving through the theorist’s technical talk, the idea of artist as godlike Creator is of course well-regarded since at least the Romantic era in the West. Seeking truth through the creative process rather than through reason: that too is Romantic. The Demiurgic Creator didn’t explain or interpret his actions; he just did it. The ancient gnostics were I think more passive knowers, trying to probe the eternal truths behind the corrupt material creation, not unlike the Greek idealists. But to become a human creator is to take sides with the Demiurge, to make truth rather than only knowing truth. The intent is, I believe, to preserve the elements and overall structure of gnosticism but reject or invert or Mobius-ize the dualism of matter/creation=evil and form/thought=good.
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