Late City / VY2K
This is my Documentary Review from a week ago -- I'm sorry, it took some time to get me signed up to post! Thanks for reading,
Joe Posner
IR180.95
2/22/05
Incomplete Images
The two short pieces of film we watched this week for class, Late City and VY2K, both have new media and politics directly in their sights. Late City, in representing history and conveying information across great distances through television, and VY2K in creating it with VR military simulators and controllers that also span great distance. At the screening last night, Prof. Der Derian described VY2K as engaging the question of whether all the new technology should be viewed as an “enabler” or an “estranger.” It’s clear from the wide range of opinions expressed in VY2K that both of these statements are in some cases true. But while the utopian arguments for technology and new media made are important and inspiring, considering what we have today, the intermediate between then and the future utopians hope and work for, we need to be skeptical of both technology that eases the possibility of war, and arguments that simply blame that technology rather than the people and institutions using the technology. All the images we’re given now are at least somewhat incomplete – and the most we can learn from them is to be cognizant of that fact, skeptical, but not without a sense of history and of the possible future.
Late City’s segment on the Zapruder film of Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 makes, on the surface, important arguments about media representation of history in our age: if it is not documented in images, it is not history -- but images do not tell the whole story in any way. And as Art Simon points out in Late City, their meaning can be created as much by context as their content. This week’s reading in Tube of Plenty makes an important point about the context that media broadcast has had since the very beginning: “The network, having ‘sold’ a period, seemed to regard it as sponsor property, to be used as he designated. Sponsors were, in effect, being encouraged to take charge of the air.” (Barnouw, Erik. Tube of Plenty. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. p.57) Though things may seem different, the correlation between Nielsen ratings and advertising prices, between the constant threat of advertisers dropping your show, their influence shouldn’t be undervalued. This fact brings up a key intertext between Late City and “real” TV: while some of it’s advanced techniques in style have been adopted by popular TV, it’s stance against the superiority of images and the “military-industrial-media complex” hasn’t so much. An obvious exception is The Daily Show, but Jon Stewart will readily admit that his much-needed criticism of other media outlets is simply a search for laughs and advertising dollars, not “truth.” Late City seems much more pure in their intentions, and perhaps then its ultimate failure to become “ real TV” shouldn’t be so surprising: from the beginning, centrally broadcasted new media needs to be for the sponsors, because “press is free for those who own one,” not for those who will criticize those who own one.
In Prof. Der Derian’s “Cyber War” section of Late City, and in the various interviews in VY2K we see a more direct engagement of new tools used on the battlefield, and how new media redefines the commander’s relationship to that battlefield. Though Jaron Lanier professes to believe in the possibility of VR to perhaps create a pure improvisational space of human creativity, this half-statement shown in the documentary is certainly not the whole story. In a wired article Prof. Der Derian wrote for Wired about military simulators, he makes a much more pertinent point (to this class at least): “The simulated battlefield makes killing and dying less plausible, and therefore more possible.” (Der Derian, James. “Cyber-Deterrence.” http://www.watsoninstitute.org/infopeace/vy2k/deterrence.cfm) This sentiment is echoed in a general consensus in VY2K: “tele-presence,” and the ability of new technology to extract people from the physical battlefield gives the illusion of control and make the war theatre seem much more like a play than a “human” endeavor. One critic even calls military “seductive,” as technology suggests “battle management,” again calling to mind theatre and business. Lanier’s optimistic statement of the possibility of “shared dreaming” seems much more malicious now – is this shared dream one where we’ll let images convince us to go to war under false pretenses? Or one where the supposed “control” over military action will make us dream of an impossibly “symbolic war?” Michael Ignatieff’s idea of symbolic war, in the context presented seems like a step forward: war will be able to get away from actual killing, and just send messages. This is nothing to be pleased about – I for one, would rather complicated diplomatic politics through conversation (or televised conversations) rather than precision bombs (or televised bombings).
The arguments faulting technology were initially much more convincing than those praising technology’s creative and potentially democratizing power as they inspire fear of technology as an “estranger,” because they show how on a large scale they might make going to war a little bit easier, a little bit less real, and as Der Derian says in Late City, simplified to a “screenful of good guys, bad guys, and passive viewers.” But the cloak that both VY2K and Late City pull over our eyes is a particular subjectivity – one that the producers of the films will readily admit to – that they’ve privileged the importance of their type of media (be it TV or VR) over the powerful forces that existed before it, and still exist above it. At last week’s screening of Why We Fight, Jarecki warned of the same thing. Just as it is “people who make the VR” (Mark Pesce, VY2K), it is people that use it too – people guided by their actions, but also by the pre-existing institutions in which they act. Both of these documents could be partially faulted for their narrow focus, but they do make some attempt to address their incomplete nature: Late City mentions the protests at news stations during the Gulf War and curious lack of demonstration at the pentagon. VY2K engages creative minds that are thinking outside of the box of current events. While both provide adequate and necessary warning about the present skepticism about images and technology, they don’t hold people and institutions accountable: people still pull the trigger on a “smart” bomb and people could read the written word rather than watch images of falling bombs. Their decisions are based on so much more than the technology they use to make them.
Comments
Alexis Lowry
Global Media
Documentary Review For Grin Without a Cat by Chris Marker
In Leora’s literature review she discusses Kittler’s notion of discourse networks. Using John Johnson’s edited volume of interviews she quotes, “the notion of the discourse network points to the fact that at any given cross-sectional moment in the life of a culture, only certain data (and no other) are selected, stored, processed, transmitted or calculated, all else being ‘noise’…” Simply put, discourse networks are essentially the selective process of historicizing: they are how our information is presented and preserved. As such documentaries play a distinctive part in the process of creating a cultural vocabulary. Chris Marker’s documentary Grin Without a Cat falls neatly into this context. As a historical narrative on the cultural movements of the late sixties and seventies, Marker creates a unique rhetoric on the interplay between media and the cultural and political life of this period.
In trying to historicize his film, Marker adopts the form of the cinematic essay to present his material. Using a multitude of media such as found footage, army films, televised interviews and letters; Marker creates a literary narrative that examines the ‘truth’ behind the events of his era. In this way, his film stands as an anthology of the Leftist movements that erupted in 1967. Weaving together his many sources, Marker claims to act as the editor of this collection instead of the director of the film. He makes this explicit by crediting himself as editor rather than director. The implication behind this act is that the film examines the social movements taking place in a historical rather than editorial perspective. Yet, as we all know from taking global media for the past two months, it is impossible to separate the filmmaker from his subject matter. In the case of Marker’s documentary, the distinct connections he draws between the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the intellectual movements of the early twentieth century and the leftist movements from 1967 to 1977 clearly place him in the tradition of European socialist intellectuals.
In the opening sequence of the film Marker inter-splices images of revolution and student movements from around the world with scenes from Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin—which presented the mutiny of the Odessa ship as a symbol of the later Russian Revolution. This beginning montage serves two purposes. The first is that the images combined with the narrators voice over make explicit the links between 1967 and 1967 and the 1917 revolution: the narrator says in 1968 the world had its very own 1917. The more implicit reading of this sequence is that Marker is tying his film into the intellectual artistic movements of the 1920’s. By invoking Eisenstein, Marker clearly establishes himself within the institution of socialist filmmaking.
Eisenstein pioneered the montage technique. Believing that through filmic montages he could jerk people out of their unconscious acceptance of the commodity culture that was overwhelming Europe in early 20th century, Eisenstein used images to create a dialectic that would awaken the population to the potential for real totality beyond the sphere of consumerism. The utopian assumption behind this technique was that the activism of knowing something would inspire individuals to take ownership of their own society. Thus, Potemkin was a film that put forth a synthetic vision of a collective moment, one that expressed the totality of the Bolshevik revolution.
Marker seizes directly upon this idea, using montage throughout the film to foster dialectical thinking. Introducing the Cold War and the circumstances surrounding the outbreak of the student movements through the Vietnam War, he juxtaposes images of American consumerism—couples talking about acquiring televisions—with US air raid campaigns and suffering Vietnamese. He describes the Cold War through these images as the collapse of the search for and attempt to establish universal truths. He also presents images of draft resistors and army recruiters; all this footage combined evokes the deep cultural tensions that were at the heart of the leftist movements of the late 1960’s.
Throughout the rest of the film Marker examines the manifestation of these cultural tensions in the various student uprisings and socialist revolts of 1967 and 1968. He continually uses the montage technique to force his audiences to draw their own conclusions about the meanings of these events. As his film moves from nation to nation and movement-to-movement investigating each individual uprising, the importance of media becomes more important—both as a unifying factor and a force driving the decentralization of the socialist engagements of this period, and Marker’s use of montage highlights this significance.
Technology is the means by which socialists from around the world were connected, and through his use of letters, television footage, and other media Marker clearly presents this idea. The images joined by montage are symbolic of the mass communication and global convergence that media facilitates. Thus, Marker uses scenes from student protests in France over the arrest of the prominent socialist Regis Debray’s in Bolivia in April 1967. Debray was arrested because of his controversial book Revolution in the Revolution, which he wrote after conversations with Fidel Castro about guerilla warfare tactics. Marker combines the protest footage with segments of interviews with Castro to reveal the international collectivity of the socialist community.
Yet, as Marker presents the connectivity of this community he simultaneously negates it by illustrating that the consumer culture which socialist rejected was the driving force behind the advance of technology, which united them. This ironic depiction of the media’s function in society exemplifies some of the reasons for the fundamental failure of the Leftist movements in the seventies, which Marker examines in the second half of the film.
Marker’s documentary contributes to the formation of a discourse network about the 20th century by presenting the complexities of the sixties and seventies through the images and texts that were produced as events were unfolding. The effect is that his documentary stands a compilation of ideas about the rise and disillusion of the Left in this era. One that is filtered by Marker’s own ideas of socialism and technology, derived from early 20th century thinkers. Yet, while the Marker clearly aligns his narrative with the early socialist artist and media theory through invoking Eisenstein, it is frustrating that he does not follow this theme further. When discussing the student movements in Pairs Marker glosses over the invaluable role of Guy Debord and the Situationists International in developing the discourse of social unrest that energized the movement. While this topic is perhaps not that accessible to mass audience, the rest of the film is so sophisticated that it would hardly seem out of place. While the account of this time period is detailed and complex, ultimately the film is too long and the connections between movements too embedded within the cinematic discourse for this documentary to be compelling to a wide audience. But perhaps a broad viewership was not Marker’s intention in the first place. In which case, the documentary is a riveting exploration of the sixties and seventies, and the lineage of 20th century socialism.
Posted by: Alexis Lowry | March 14, 2006 04:21 PM