Kiss me, Edward
Kiss me, Edward
You might have hoped that the rotten elements had gone away to leave you to discuss ‘politics’ in peace. You may have even hoped that we turned the site into a proper tribute to Edward Upward. If you did hope for this, I love you, I do.
But the July 2006 issue is up and running with more treats for kiddies. (http://www.rottenelements.org.uk/July%2006.html)
Lawrence Parker — a rotten reception (starring members of the UK Left Network)
Paul Hill — woodpecker (his condition buried alive)
— improvisations (be angry bring aid)
Vivian Bolus — letter to Hackney Gazette (TRUCE is out there)
P. Duster — tiny, crappy people (the idiot Lenin)
— bleeding war of position (Kerouac, egg ‘n’ chips)
Contributions
We are asking for contributions for next month’s online issue around the words ‘Walter Ulbricht’. Send your thoughts on this important topic to vorzedia@yahoo.co.uk.
Our first print issue will appear in August-ish. In a grand populist gesture L. Parker will be discussing Bob Dylan and the silly things that traumatised Trots have written about him down the years. Should be fun, eh?
“Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up.”
- Login or register to post comments
- Printer-friendly version
Are you wasting our time?
You might be terribly clever and I terribly thick, but what is this post about? If you want to alert people to the existence of a website with some poems about art and revolution, can't you just direct us there with the link? Kiss me, Edward? Are you wasting our time? Don't you know people are getting arrested and locked up all over the world (see first item on the front page) for saying inconvenient things... about politics?
Come on now
For the record I am not a 'pissed poster'. Anyone who looks at the site will realise that it's serious.
I am well aware that people are getting locked up and killed for their politics. I am a Marxist. I am for the self-liberation of my class and know the dangers that might entail. But what should I do? Lose my sense of humour? Stop writing poems out of a sense of solidarity with my comrades across the globe? Pretend I live in Iran and go around with my gob shut?
Your reaction to this, Vicki, is typical of the left. Get on with the 'real' stuff of politics, stop wasting our time. It's got a long heritage in Stalinism and Trotskyism.
The only thing I am 'guilty' of is wanting AWL comrades to read our website. Surely that says something to you. I like what some of your comrades write on art; others I don't like at all. But that's life.
I am not wasting anyone's time. We are comrades, why not be civil to one another and get on with a real debate?
Lawrence (rotten elements)
Putting yourself in other people's shoes
It's very easy to portray me as a humourless, backward type who doesn't 'get' art. I think you ought to treat my complaint as a way to learn something about how you 'present' or 'offer' your art. In my view, your way of 'offering' your art is bad: it was NOT clear from your post what the hell you were on about. If you wanted people to visit your website called Art and revolution, you could helpfully and respectfully have put a link there and invited them to visit your website called Art and revolution. As it was, your blurb came across as gobbledygook OR pretentious, self-regarding drivel OR offputting, full of references to people and things I'd never heard of.
I knew that I was probably being harsh when I posted that comment, and I rather suspected that at the back of it was someone young (you are, aren't you, quite young) and exuberant and full of revolutionary ardour and probably quite bright. I didn't want to piss on your parade, but I still posted because it's useful for you to know how your post can come across.
Some people shy away from getting involved in politics precisely because they think they aren't going to get all the references, know who all the people are, know who said what to who, and so on. Your blurb for your website was right in the vein of that sort of offputting, terribly knowledgeable-sounding spiel that makes the uninitiated feel like a thicko and slink away in shame - or disgust.
I'm going on a bit, aren't I? I actually posted my rather horrid post because I wanted you to feel how others could feel reading your blurb, which you might have thought was fun but which I frankly found alienating.
It's fair to accuse you of wasting people's time as well. I had to go away and look up some references to Edward Upward to even know if I wanted to visit your website, and when I found out about him my decision was that I would rather not spend my time reading about Edward Upward but would rather spend my time trying to find contacts to give me uptodate information on what was happening over the arrests in Russia - but you had by that time already... wasted my time.
This is quite complicated, he-said, she-said stuff and might not seem worth the candle, but I do think you have something useful to learn from this about Presentation. That's why I'm going on about it. Don't be embarassed to be told off by little old me! Ask your comrades... not one of them has a whit of respect for me!
Difference
Vicki,
maybe we have things to learn about one another and to that end I think this is an okay debate to have.
I know that I post in an idiosyncratic way that is not to everyone's taste (other people have written to me and said they found it funny). That's fine.
However, I don't think this issue is a narrow one of form. One of the points about the rotten elements' 'position' (we don't have a 'line' as such) is that the left looks at art and wants to interpret it through very narrow spectacles. Thus I read a review in left-wing journals of say, the new Ken Loach film, and I just read about 'politics' in the narrow sense of talking about the IRA and so on (the Weekly Worker had a particularly bad review recently), while what it actually is (a piece of art, a film) goes undiscussed. I find this quite alienating and dangerous in that lighting, acting styles and so on are impregnated with messages (often reactionary) that the left just ignores and leaves in place. This goes down (usually) like a sack of shit with artists.
Understanding difference (in the context of a relationship with society) is thus key in anything the left does (trade union work, campaigns and so on). Everything is not the same. It's capitalism that tends to tell us that everythis is the same (a commodity).
So I could post a blurb in a 'traditional' lefty type of way that would only have the effect of misleading people as to what the rotten elements is about. I could also 'camoflauge' things with a campaigns list or whatever. This wouldn't be honest. We don't want to do the 'same' thing as the left has done in the past with art. Personally, I find the traditional 'lefty' way of debate quite suffocating. However, just because it comes across as bizarre doesn't mean that I am any less of a Marxist (which I think you recognise).
Like, I say Vicki, maybe we have to learn about one another and I really want activists such as yourself to read our stuff. You might not like it, or feel comfortable with it. But that's democracy. I don't like everything the AWL says but I still read your stuff.
To me, reading about Edward Upward is not a waste of time. To be honest I think it is good if people look him up as he was one of the best writers produced by the CPGB (and they had a few good ones). I'm sorry that you think this is a waste of time.
I suppose in left-wing terms I am young (30s), but not young, young.
By the way, I also do children's parties …
Regards,
Lawrence
Art and politics
Hi Lawrence
I think I know what you're getting at. But the explicit politics of a film - especially by Loach, whose films are very politically-determined - is surely a part of its art. I'm not sure I really see how an acting style or system of lighting can be reactionary. (I can see more scope for this sort of argument with styles of shot: neo-realism, much 'third cinema', the novelle vague, etc, were all concerned about the 'democratic' nature of wide shots, fewer close-ups, deep focus, and so on, and up to a point I know what they were talking about).
For me an absolutely key aspect of a film is its narrative structure, and what that tells you about the world - that is, what the film makers mean it to tell you. LIghting, editing, acting - for me (as a practising 'artist', or aspiring to be an artist) - are fundamentally subordinated to that.
Pissed?
Pissed Poster, Perchance?
About what?
What is it that you want to debate? It's rather hard to tell from your post.
Art and politics 2
Hello Clive,
Of course, I am not denying that the explicit politics of a piece are an integral part of its art. But I would quote Trotsky:"… one cannot approach art as one can politics, not because artistic creation is a religious rite or something mystical … but because it has its own laws of development." I think all too often comrades who stand in the Trotskyist tradition (I don't actually but I rate him highly as a thinker) forget this and do the opposite to Trotsky's advice, going in for some kind of ideological ram-raid whenever they consider a piece of art. I don't often get much sense of aesthetics reading the left.
I'm not really a big fan of Loach. I enjoyed Land and Freedom but only really in a limited 'political' way. I found Loach's use of the key character as rather sentimental (and typically 'bourgeois') and I think this neuters the political message. The idea of this character's entry into Spain and then escape gave people who don't share Loach's politics an easy route into the world of 'adventure'. Imagine if this character had been shot by the Stalinists (like in Dos Passos's 'Adventures of a young man'), reversing the heroic template. Much more demanding.
I know what you mean about narrative structure predominating. I'm not actually so conscious of it as you but I can see it comes out even if I have produced a fairly bizarre stream of consciousness. But then, I don't think this is a neutral happening. The idea that we have this narrative bearing down on us even in such a relatively 'free' realm such as art surely encodes a message about the society we live, where we are constantly being looped back into commodities and money. I'm not decrying structures per se, but nothing is neutral.
Ditto lighting and acting styles. I'm not an expert but a production that has 'natural' lighting and a cast of 'method' actors is, to me, attempting (maybe even not consciously) to hide its origins as a product and a fiction. To that extent, I find narrow 'realism' ultimately reverts into a spectacle that towers over the viewer.
Regards,
Lawrence
Art and politics
I agree entirely with Trotsky. For me a problem with Loach is that his films are so driven by an explicit political message - one result being that if you demur from the message it makes it hard to think about the rest of it, and in any case it tends to subordinate human beings, relationships, character etc to that message.
But I think we might disagree with each other. One of my favourite more recent films was 'The Beat that My Heart Skipped', directed by Jaques Audiard. I'm not sure what 'politics' you'd dig out from it, though I dare say you could if you tried. It's a very simple human story about a guy who's lost his ambition to be a pianist because he's got caught up in being a heavy for his criminal father; he tries to go back to becoming a pianist. I entirely agree that it would be dumb to look at the film in terms of its politics. But what it fundamentally says about the world is contained in its *story* - the characters and what they do, and what happens to them. To my mind *far* too much film criticism (of the more academic variety anyway) focuses on subordinate things, like how it's shot, how it was edited, all that. These are all things which serve the story. I don't mean they're not interesting. But a film is not simply a series of technical processes.
I think I'd say the same about natural light and method acting. Your point, I feel, is far too general. Natural light, for instance, was used by neo-realists in the forties and fifties partly for a political purpose (they wanted to express life as it really was, as they saw it, on the Italian street), and partly for practical reasons - it's cheaper. Is 'Bicycle Thieves' trying to 'hide its origins as a product and a fiction'? Rhetorically, maybe, in the ambition to show a 'slice of life'. (And there are further things in that direction - the main character is played by a factory worker, not a trained actor, etc) But I don't think anyone, in 1948 or now, would be under any doubt that what they are watching is fictional.
The dogme people advocated the use of natural light because it forces film makers to be simple, go back to basics - which I suppose is an aesthetic principle, but also, in an indirect way, political in a sense. One of the best known dogme films - The Idiots - is kind of *about* what's make-believe and what isn't, where the borders are, etc etc.
I wonder in any case how much most people in audience are able to judge, or interested in doing so, whether a shot has been lit by electricity or not. For myself, if the style 'drew attention to itself' in that way - watching the story you start thinking, 'oh, I wonder how they lit that?' - the film is in trouble.
Sure, structures aren't neutral. It's a commonplace that stories have a 'beginning, middle and end'. And there's a version of that in Hollywood film in which the ending, necessarily, is the restoration of order in the most bourgeois-ideological sense. Nevertheless, I think it's true stories do have beginnings, middles and ends; and how they are structured - for instance, what the ending is - says a lot about how the storytellers see the world.
Maybe what's at issue here is that my tastes are more 'conservative' than yours - I'm not really into stream-of-consciousness etc and my own work is very 'crafted'.
Audiences
Clive,
I feel that putting factors of aesthetic production under the sign of 'subordinate things' is intensely problematic. Rather, I think it would (in very generalised terms) be a shifting contradiction between 'story' and production, something to be investigated in every concrete aesthetic case. For example (I realise that we both keep offering up examples to shift the debate towards us - nevertheless I think it is useful), Citizen Kane parades its technical artifice to the point at which I feel dazzled and reasonably humbled by it. I'm not that caught up in the storyline, partly because I think its 'jigsaw nature' keeps jogging the viewer away from it. I watch Citizen Kane (and Kulbrick's 2001) in the same way as I look at paintings in a gallery.
I'm also intrigued by your comment that: "For myself, if the style 'drew attention to itself' in that way - watching the story you start thinking, 'oh, I wonder how they lit that?' - the film is in trouble." Of course, in Brechtian terms, the film wouldn't be in trouble at all. So, something such as La Chinoise by Godard keeps smacking you around the chops with the terms of its production, but it is oddly riveting and doesn't stop you being interested in the characters. Also, a viewer's mood shifts during a film, a reified object one moment is pulled in by the audience and retracted the next. (I am not wholly sold on Brechtian methods as an ultimatum. I think, psychologically they nip back into Stalinism at points. That, however, is a whole different issue.)
So, in that sense, Clive, I am interested to know how you as a producer see the audience. In the quote above it appears to be quite passive — a bit like myself being 'dazzled' by Welles on my sofa.
Regards,
Lawrence
Sorry...
... I missed this before. Few points.
I think a lot of stylistically radical things probably 'work' when they're first thought of - because they're part of some movement to move the art form on, which is usually a good thing - but can get stale and pointless out of that context. I think that's true of Brechtian conceptions, and Godard et al. (Citizen Kane, too, though I admit that for me the fact that the story is a mess is a big problem with the film).
I think certain kinds of Brechtian methods can still work. For instance, it's kind of Brechtian where, in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing various characters speak directly to camera: you're being reminded that this is a film. But it works because it focuses the story, the characters, the emotion and so on of the story. A film like Adaptation, which is about the process of writing and film making, of course draws attention to itself, various aesthetic issues (of a sort), but it works because - well, that's what it's about.
But I'm inclined to think that any old 'alienation' technique - for its own sake - is kind of pointless. I don't think Brecht's idea was particularly to do with drawing attention to the aesthetics, anyway - was it? It was more to do with not allowing the audience to feel comfortable and spoon-fed, and trying to force them to make up their own minds about the questions raised by a drama. It was a *dramatic* device (and a political one), rather than an 'aesthetic' one. If you see what I mean.
I'm not sure I have ever completely understood, though, what this active/passive audience thing really means in practice. I don't wish to sound philistine about this, but the audience *is* passive, by definition, in the sitting-on-the-sofa sense. They can't climb into the screen. But they also are active, in the sense of interpreting, deciding what they think, making judgements - always. Certainly you can construct a narrative dogmatically and didactically - which is what I think Loach does, and which I don't like - or more so it poses questions, leaves things less resolved, more ambivalent, and so on (ie, I think, doesn't try to suggest that you as the artist fucking know everything).
BTW, you may have meant 'producer' in the sense of producing any piece of art. In the more specific use of the word in film and television, I am categorically not a producer. :-)
In my experience everybody involved in making a drama, for film, TV or theatre, thinks decisions about shooting styles, editing, lighting, design, etc are 'subordinate' to story telling and character. That's not to say that decisions about those things are secondary, but that they serve a function, fullfil a purpose, rather than having ends in themselves.
form and content
Clive,
I agree that if something is used for the sake of just being used, it is pretty pointless.
I'll watch Do the right thing again. The point you use about Lee's 'Brechtian' touches homing back in on the story borders on something I'm working on at the moment. I've been trawling through some old CPGB writers such as Harold Heslop where I think I can gauge that he has attempted to compress form and content together in a rigid unity in order to serve a political end (Moscow was giving him some grief). Even in this extreme circumstance, form, at points, is still distinct and not reducible to the content. Thus, in your point about Lee, form slides back into content but the fact that you have drawn it out suggests it is not reducible.
I like Brecht at points but I think his problem is precisely explaining the aesthetic away or attempting to cut away boundaries so that the audience can impinge upon production. I think this borders on the psychology of 'high' Stalinism; a movement that understood nothing except its own alienation. For me it's useful rather to explore the ever-shifting contradiction between audience and producer rather than plump for an either/or of full-on audience involvement or lifeless contemplation. Which I'm guessing is somewhere close to where you are.
I agree with you completely on Loach. I think it is about time the left came up with a deeper critique. But the problem is that the left just sees some or maybe all of its politics on screen and never moves on to discuss the mode in which this is being delivered. I also experienced first-hand some alarming sycophancy from the likes of the SWP towards Loach in the Socialist Alliance. I find this quite ironic when I read British Maoist journals of the 1960s laying into Godard (some of it was crude, other bits quite subtle).
Lawrence
Rotten august with Ulbricht and Bolus
The rotten elements are on the march.
We have recruited new people. We now have an investigative reporter called Bolus "a marxist tequila-slurping drug-ingesting fucking angry gonzoid monkey journo", who we love very much, even more than Edward Upward.
August highlights:
HERE is fucked
sudden waft of draw
the leaders of today's CPGB/Weekly Worker group still express this Stalinist view on art
It contains your sexy alienated fate
small planes happened under sunny skies
flying the hammer and sickle from the village church
big fucking horn section like Rocky
'Don't the rotten elements make the revolution sound interesting?'
www.rottenelements.org.uk
rotten elements on loach
Partly following on from the debate with Clive above (and also because we got fed up writing about seedy holidays in Southeast Asia, and evangelical pigs in Hackney) we recklessly wade into Loach here in the pages of the Weekly Worker:
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/647/loach.htm
And here, in longer view, on the rotten elements:
http://www.rottenelements.org.uk/loach.html
Have a lovely time perusing both while we try and remember more about our holidays…
Daily Telegraph
You could also wade into me, as the Daily Telegraph did. Today I got my first 'execrable' (as in 'execrable mess') from the Torygraph, which is rather exciting. This was for 'A Harlot's Progress', C4, thursday. Anyone wishing to tell me they quite liked it, well, it would be nice.
I liked it a lot
And the more it went on, the more I liked it. Felt really quite emotionally involved by the latter stages. And a sense of injustice at the treatment of women began to well up in me about a third of the way through and got to screaming pitch by the end.
I hope I got the point, cos it seemed to be to be a real "plus ca change ..." story. Yes, the eighteenth century was brutal in a way that turns our stomachs today, but some of the sexual moralism, and the exploitation, lives on and then some.
A few bits I really loved:
I would have liked to have understood better why Mary became a whore to start with; and I'd like to have seen a bit more of Mr & Mrs Hogarth's life before Mary came along so as to get a better idea of how Mary changed it. Minor gripes.
Hey, you should have been more worried if the Telegraph had praised it.