How fun it is to say “the Internet went on strike today.” Of course, e-commerce went on trucking along, but protest actions by giants like Google and Wikipedia, Craigslist and reddit made sure only Luddites and the willfully blind would remain ignorant of the ongoing controversy surrounding the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act (SOPA/PIPA), pending legislation that threatens the structure and spirit of the web. Wikipedia’s English-language page “went dark” in protest of the bill; Google replaced its iconic logo with a censor bar; Tumblr enabled its users to “black out” their pages for the day; WordPress created plugins to allow bloggers to do the same.

These are the big guys, who have big stakes in the future free flow of information. The fate of lil’ guys like Hydra is, for now, tied up with theirs. We publish on a WordPress platform from our Mozilla browsers, we garner readership and comments from Google hits and Tumblr, and (perhaps more often than we’d like to admit) our research forays bring us into the bowels of Wikipedia.

Better and more qualified policy wonks have explained the nuts and bolts of how SOPA/PIPA will stifle innovation, encroach on free speech. Instead of attempting a clumsy recap, or pretending that anyone in Congress would notice our humble blog’s blackout, we offer a tailored account of what the implications of these laws would be for us, and perhaps for others like us.

Our mission statement as it stands is simple: to undertake – to experiment with – the essay in an online format.  We once considered a more fleshed-out attempt to explain ourselves in a discussion that dissolved into the ether of email inboxes:

Hydra is a collective of writers with varied interests, bound together by a vision of what is possible when the strength of life perseveres and pushes against the wire and concrete. We reject containment. We are world-town and we are polycephalic. “Without the possibility of parole.” We smash sentence, we write.

Begun as a dream in the misty oviduct of the Northern California Bay Area, its original heads have split or moved, moved and split, and are now spread over this lizard-green globe. Following a range of callings, our interests span the cultural, political, and galactic spheres of life. This is to insinuate that, in our minds, the cultural, political, and galactic spheres of life are inseparable domains. Therefore, following such as what we might call our editorial policy, we strive and look for the indivisible and the syncretic, the symbiotic and the cross-fertilized. These are aspects of what might be called a borderzone standpoint. And in this magazine are its highways to tomorrow’s classical thought.

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Concretely, what does this mean? We are interested in exploring and cultivating new practices of online criticism, such as:

• Use of the hyperlink – to engage in dialogue with the ideas and words of other writers and artists, to cross-reference our own articles in order to build and elaborate on cohesive intra-publication themes, to highlight the intertextuality and multi-vocal character of our writings, to reference external material without disturbing narrative flow, to replace formal citations, to offer readers the option of more fragmented, non-linear, and/or autonomous modes of reading that can lead to independent exploration (surfing) and multitasking (especially with the use of “tabs”).
• Use of embedded media -  to more precisely reference the musical/cinematic/visual works that we wish to comment upon,  to set tone and atmosphere and to suggest context or trains of thought better alluded to than written out, to demonstrate synchronicity between ideas and artworks across different fields and temporal divides, to speak in the format and parlance of music blogs and experiment with the idea of article as mixtape, as bricolage, for juxtaposition, as pastiche, to create written works fully fused with visual and auditory elements, which is to say, to create “essays” that are also “experiences.”
• Multiplatform publication / microblogging – to find readership, like-minds, and fellow enthusiasts (particularly, with regard to our more obscure interests), to engage in the discipline of keeping ourselves concise,  to play with redigesting, disassembling, and reconstructing our own product, to recognize ourselves as part and parcel of the content-producing masses.

SOPA/PIPA threaten these exact tools, the building blocks of our experiment. And on a more basic level, by endangering the vitality of the online spaces where we meet up and interact,  SOPA/PIPA could preclude the maintenance of psychically-bonded-but-geographically scattered, borderzone families like ours.

If it sounds far-fetched that all this could be put in jeopardy under the auspices of enhanced copyright enforcement, consider the very real possibility of an Internet Black List of alleged infringers — part of the original SOPA/PIPA drafts — that could knock sites off the web.  Take a look at the structural parallels with the Great Chinese Firewall. Hell, look at hip hop bloggers, and the crazy, Orwellian shit the American government has already done to them.

This legislation imperils the the type of syncretic and cross-fertilized creative expressions that we find most inspiring. The anti-circumvention provisions before Congress would hobble the efforts of international activists to evade internet censorship, surveillance, and persecution, further isolating us from the dissident artists residing under repressive regimes that are well-beloved by our editorial staff. At risk are technologies like Tor, the anonymising software that masks users’ IP addresses, which was instrumental during the Egyptian protests. Also VPNs, proxies, etc.

Simply put, SOPA/PIPA are at odds with the development of shit we like to talk about, and how we talk about it. Such as: the art that has flourished through the new media of Youtube, Google Streetview. Such as: cross-border musical flows. Can you imagine Worldtown without the World Wide Web? Without online mixtapes, the international blogosphere, or soundcloud? These laws would impose an untenable drag on parody, remix, assemblage, homage, détournement, cover/fan art and (horror of horror) the proliferation of memes.  Which is to say – if and when the Revolution comes, we will stand with Cheezburger.

Albrecht Durer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. — Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

The end of the year prompts all sorts of rituals of recollection. We’ve once again revolved around the sun, and to prepare us for the celestial rhythms of the next cycle, turning our gaze backwards allows us to reflect on where we’re heading, as if no great distance separated the before from the after. To some remarkable extent, we’re still here, alive on the planet, although we might not be so confident of our stay for much longer. This year, the proliferation of apocalyptic tales, natural disasters, eschatological nightmares, and the perpetual recycling of end of history lamentations have permeated the inclinations of both popular and unpopular culture, especially in music (and film, too, as Hydra’s Jose-Luis Moctezuma relays), spreading its virus through the subterranean fringes, and whatever one might still call the avant-garde.

Perhaps we’ve come to take seriously some of the unnerving considerations proposed by philosopher Ray Brassier, that our impending extinction requires our deepest reflection, one which should reorient our thinking away from the anthropocentric framework of the Copernican Revolution, to regions unbound by the gravitational pull between earth and sun. Enlightenment requires an absolutely unhuman mode of thinking, living, creating. Unhinging ourselves, as Brassier prescribes, would certainly follow to its end the internal logic of what Simon Reynolds recounts in his book published earlier this year, Retromania: Popular music has turned its activities to the past, bewitched by the ruins of history and recordings, disjointed from its temporal circumstances by the internet’s diffusive mode of networking and distributing information. But if the difference between past, present, and future no longer holds in any simplistic chronological order, what then becomes of history, of world-annihilation, without an end in sight?

Mark Fisher, who has written imaginative politico-economic examinations of  music on his blog, K-Punk, suggests in his recent book, Capitalist Realism, that our current obsession with annihilation reflects a stifled awareness that, in our post cold-war malaise where we are frozen by the never ending war on terror, we can no longer even envision an escape from late capitalism–a horizon outside the ever expanding frontiers of the market system in which everything is swallowed. His diagnosis certainly gains some weight from the year’s many events of unrest, from the revolutions invoked by the Arab Spring, and its continuing struggles, the Eurozone’s teetering on the edge of collapse, to the global eruption of physical occupations of the idea of Wall Street. Nevertheless, earlier this year, a Christian radio broadcaster’s warnings of rapture did not come to pass. Twice. But now, the dawn of 2012, and the fabled end of the Mayan calendar, is upon us.

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As for music itself, few releases captivated this year’s disoriented, apocalyptic zeitgeist as well as James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual. Conceptually daring, alienating, horrifically ordinary and optimistic in the most disturbing way possible–Far Side Virtual is a nearly unlistenable musical theory of the technological dream in which we are all enraptured. Ferraro pulls sonic detritus from iPhone apps, computer start-up noises, ringtones, late 1980s and early ’90s infomercials and commercials, Pixar films, and music scrapped from video games menus and end game sequences. While anchored in references to synth-pop, Far Side‘s virtually encoded soundscape is modified through an Apple laptop with digital beds of drum patterns and glowing, synthetic shine.

At first, I couldn’t quite figure out Ferraro’s stance: sincere, ironic, critical? What I’ve determined, though, is that his intention doesn’t matter much. Ferraro’s artistic talent lies in a phenomenological sensitivity for hyper-realism: the way contemporary, digitally networked technology is altering our way of desiring, connecting, committing. In interviews, he has reported to tap into this hyper-realism in strip malls in Los Angeles, St. Marks in New York, and the global non-space of Starbucks cafes. After listening to the album a few times, just on tinny laptop speakers, I’ve come to find myself exiled to a strange sensation of lost, endless time within an enhanced world, one whose cycles arhythmically (un)balance the rapid production and satisfaction of distributed desire. It’s spontaneous and overwhelming.

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Many music journalists come to understand and listen to Ferraro’s music in terms of the theoretical framework of hypnagogic pop, a concept initiated by The Wire’s David Keenan set to mark the recent emergence of lo-fi rock evoking a nebulous psychological state between being awake and dreaming. Is this space something of the last frontier? Given the kind of anxiety and unrest Ferraro’s work inspires, and the hyper-sterilized space within which it puts into motion its labor, the hypnagogic might just establish the deterritorialized boundaries for a new sort of mobilization. Simon Reynolds sums it up concisely: ”Perhaps the secret idea buried inside hypnagogic pop is that the ’80s never ended. That we’re still living there, subject to that decade’s endless end of History, killing time as we wait for something (seismic, subaltern) to rupture the dream.”

Ferraro wasn’t the only musician this year to harness the kitsch of the dream and remagnetize the tech-utopia of waking life. John Maus, also working within the sphere of 1980s synth-pop, produced an excellent record of romantic solipsism and city-living despair. In short, he wrestles with the Enlightenment myth of our alleged autonomy over our desires, and seeks out his true desire in the most unlikely sonic resonances. Maus named his record We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves after the 12th thesis of French philosopher Alain Badiou’s fifteen theses on contemporary art, published in issue 23 of Lacanian Ink:

Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.

Maus, like Ferraro, struggles to pass the threshold, without contamination, into those spaces unheralded, neglected, or forgotten by Empire–post-industrial detritus, everyday noise, abandoned infrastructure, lost time–where the markings, traces, and graffiti of outsider desire thrive. The young hip-hop producer of Dipset fame, Araabmuzik, found the source of his scrawl in the shadow of 1990s trance, some of the most ecstatic, optimistic, and highly marketed music to ever subject millions of alleged Dionysian initiates to the rush of the rave, the utopian reveries of the bass drop. I wrote on Araabmuzik’s record, aptly titled Electronic Dream, in late summer, and still marvel on its way of uncovering the dark, even tragic motivation, of classic Eurodance cheese. The haunted underbelly of trance is revealed through unsettling bass patterns, nearly arhythmic percussion, and a gurgling dose of demonic synthetic keys, all which suffocate the false idols, kitschy optimism, of the source material which he attacks, perverts, and desiccates. An unliving, underground stream awakens.

Any end of the year recap also has to account for the resurgence of the overground stream of raves in 2011. A resurgence which helped a previously unknown emo screamer turned dubstep producer, Scrillex, garner five Grammy nominations, including best new artist. Yes, dubstep has gone mainstream, a sequence launched at the beginning of the year by Britney Spears, and culminated in the easily digestible electronic rhythms of Scrillex (and a dubstep Korn album?). But despite the increasing monotony, and consistently conventional masculinity of the genre, sometimes disparagingly, or lovingly, labeled bro-step, something is left to be said of Scrillex’s bizarre music video for “First of the Year (Equinox).” If we could generalize from its narrative, and the video’s popularity at nearly 30 million views, then I have to say something is disturbing about millions of festival goers across the country identifying with a little girl who resists a pedophile’s advances through the angsty violence of Scrillex’s wobble, wobble, bass. This music doesn’t exactly mirror the utopian trance of Paul Oakenfold’s ’90s, but has mutated in the conditions of depressed times, diagnosing the general disillusionment with, yet attachment to, the dream plaguing a great deal of America’s everyday, middle-class populace.

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Some more unsettling explorations of masculinity come from Los Angeles’s Odd Future collective and Sacramento’s Death Grips. While Scrillex sycophants scorn the figure of the pedophile-like good upholders of resentful ethics, Tyler, the Creator surprisingly found a way to incarnate a kind of moral decrepitude in Goblin that prompted music critics and listeners to wage in ceaseless battles over censorship. Although Tyler fell just as quickly he rose, it seemed like no one from either side of the debate actually listened to his music. Whatever your stance on the moral caliber of his raps, Tyler’s serpent-like nihilism holds up as an antithesis to Alain Badiou’s call for us to become the “pitiless censors” of ourselves: his free reign of desire somehow taps into an illicit territory which resists facile consummation. I credit this to Tyler’s musical schizophrenia more so than any rebellious talent, one whose psychological disintegration produces a multiplicity of contradictory perspectives on a festering decay haunting both our most banal-seeming and repressed desires. Hugely popular R&B saviors, Drake and The Weeknd, on the other hand, promote a kind of self-indulgence and sexual decadence that fits all too perfectly into typologies of capital. Although, I have to admit that I find great, thoughtless pleasure in listening to The Weeknd.

Drummer Zach Hill’s side project, Death Grips, also has just as little remorse for moralists. Their release, Ex Military, sounds like the biological weaponry of Cannibal Ox, deconstructed into feverish noise and maniacal slaps of bass–nightmarish landscapes of sound recalling the destructed bio-mechanical ecologies of dystopian films from the likes of Ridley Scott and George Miller. On “Guillotine,” MC Ride spits raw verses, his voice barking a kind of incomprehensible language, whose tenor joyously approaches the precipice of apocalyptic implosion. Music, even sound, becomes dehumanized, embodying to the extreme Ray Brassier’s concept of “the unlife”. The specter of Brassier, implied in its extreme nihilism, haunts a number of releases, this year. Another brilliant record from Hype Williams, One Nation, begins with pure morbidness: a gruff voice appears from the shadows in an untitled track over sparse dub rhythms and swirling John Carpenter synth lines, insisting on the need for the living to face up to mortality: “but of course everyone dies, and you will too.” The record heeds this wisdom, playing with the fleeting character of recycled sounds from UK bass, as if they are all about to wisp away as soon as they appear.

One of the most evocative listens of the year, Kuedo’s Severant invokes the lost paradise of Scott’s Blade Runner with a recharged urgency. “Vectoral,” in particular, beautifully echoes Vangelis’s soundtrack, reframing the synthetic pulse within footwork rhythms, programmed breakdowns, and drum machine gusts of digitally-manufactured liquid wind. More than a few musicians found inspiration in the frenetic, tinny grooves bubbling up from the hoods of South and West Chicago in the form of footwork. Descending from the same sort of post-industrial depressed economies that brought about Detroit techno and ghetto-tech bootlegs, footwork sounds strangely like UK drum n’ bass or grime, as if the Black Atlantic diaspora of electronic rhythms cyphered towards synchronic destinations despite their regional dislocation. DJ Rashad’s Just a Taste EP booms with poly-percussive rhythms that shift abruptly in winding drum patterns while vocal cuts dissolve into looped beats of flittering noise. A good introduction to footwork is the second volume of Bangs & Works on Planet Mu, a compilation tracing the grooves in their constant ascension, without any final horizon in sight–after all, this is music essentially made for the dance floor.

What Kuedo’s Severant does best is guide desire to take pleasure in loss, transforming nostalgia into renewal–invigorating the shadowed wastelands perhaps once formed and shaped by Empire, but since forgotten, thrown into the gutter to rot and decay. The two releases of the year which I keep coming back to, Laurel Halo’s Hour Logic EP and Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica, conjure a kind of mournful alienation that bridges the apocalyptic character of melancholia with an ecstatic resoluteness. While Laurel Halo prefers a symbiosis between percussion and ambient fluxes pushing bio-engineered corpse of techno to new heights of potency, Oneohtrix’s alchemy consists in the sounds of analogue ambient–flooded synth melodies, electric surges, and sparse piano keys–eerily unbounded in a ghostly absence of percussion.

From turning our gaze backwards, and recycling lost time, a new music is emerging: hyper-real, intensely emotional, richly theoretical, outside anachronistic sentiments for the acoustic or authentic–slowly paving way for the impending rupture to come.

Here now are Hydra Magazine’s top ten films of 2011:

10. The Tree of Life — dir. Terrence Malick (USA)

9. Nostalgia for the Light – dir. Patricio Guzmán (Chile/Germany/France)

The thirst for cosmic presence, cosmic relevance, is one that does not leave us even when we are at our most ordinary and vulnerable. The Tree of Life’s analeptic urgency demanded something of an escape into cosmic refraction, but where it seemed to stumble upon the insurmountable obstacles of New Age aesthetics, Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (its title borrowed from a book by astronomer-poet Michel Cassé) succeeds in restricting its intellectual and emotional interests to symmetries of a less ornamental nature. The Atacama Desert in Chile is the driest desert on earth; for reason of its dryness and clarity of air, it is the site of two different (and seemingly unrelated) activities: its high altitude provides the ideal atmosphere for the research of two major astronomical observatories, from which distant galaxies are glimpsed and studied; but the desert’s vastness was also, tragically, the preferred dumping site for the assassinated political victims of the murderous Pinochet regime. The search for distant stars and planets instantly absorbs into itself the (self-same) search for the murdered victims of a grievous (and terribly recent) political past. If the stars and planets are the effects of a million years gazing back at us, then our own contemporary present is nothing less than a fleeting illusion, the momentary trace of astral states depleted long ago. An archaeology of memory, of the past that cannot, must not, be abandoned, hence, assumes a magnitude equal to that of the pain and voracious desire to know, which drives mothers, scientists, sisters, and astronomers to locate their celestial origins in the mineral sleep “of what is past, or passing, or to come.” The mournful search for the bones of the dead, beneath a moisture-less sedimentation occasionally sprinkled by the salt of fallen, minuscule teardrops, finds resonance in the daily, patient work of lonesome astronomers. Thus, “the calcium which we carry in our bones, the bones which the dead offer up to the living as consolation, is the same calcium that the farthest stars are made of, the same dust that has fallen over eons on the crust of the Atacama, and which has shaped constellations out of the remains of prehistoric man.”

8. Meek’s Cutoff — dir. Kelly Reichardt (USA)

Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff unravels with very little exposition; dialogue is muttered almost inaudibly, as if we were accidentally stumbling upon the middle of someone else’s conversation. Natural sounds blend in with human voices, sounds that describe the economy and daily chores of living permanently on the road: wind passing through blankets on a makeshift clothesline, spoons tapping and scraping on metal plates, the crackle of someone lighting a pipe or stoking a campside fire, the murmur of a devout woman reciting Bible verse, her husband splashing water in his face in the light of early morning. Events occur strictly on the plane of the immediate present, irregardless of the overtly historical character of the costume and proceedings — we are somewhere near to, but also very far from, the Oregon Trail, and we, along with a small group of emigrants traveling on a harsh wagon road known to posterity as the Meek Cutoff, are lost in the blank unfolding of the present, bewildered by the vast openness of the road and humbled by our incapacity to perceive anything more significant than the sight of the mute sun rising, and setting early, on a monotonous and water-starved landscape. Reichardt makes no effort at romanticizing or mythologizing the pastness of the past, and for this reason Meek’s Cutoff circumvents the fictitious retro-feel nostalgia that too many latter-day westerns fall into. Meek’s Cutoff is as urgently contemporary (and as urgently local) as Reichardt’s previous film, Wendy and Lucy (2008), was: the Oregon depicted in both films constitutes a being-lost-in-the-present which is timeless and indelible. Meek’s Cutoff is undoubtedly Reichardt’s greatest achievement yet, and as an exercise in the western genre, it offers the wide-screen spaciousness and cinematographic richness that all orthodox westerns are known for. But what makes Meek’s Cutoff truly original is its rigorous use of atmosphere: its sonic absorption of environmental pressures and aleatory forces produces passages which hint at but never fully reach a kind of hermetic enlightenment.

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7. The Kid with a Bike — dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Belgium/France)

6. The Mill and the Cross — dir. Lech Majewski (Poland/Sweden)

Brueghel’s famous sense of motility — multitudinous, boundless and scattered — is brought to rapturous life by Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross, one of the finest films on art to have been produced in recent memory. One is reminded of Peter Greenaway’s oeuvre, particularly Nightwatching (2007), a dramatic recreation of the historical forces that worked for and against the completion of Rembrandt’s “The Nightwatch” (1642); but Majewski’s work avoids Greenaway’s theatricality and licentious asides by immersing itself within the pictorial fabric of Brueghel’s dizzyingly meticulous canvas. Much like in Auden’s poem on Brueghel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” the historical/mythical subject has been replenished by its delimitation: its off-screen, minor placement allows for the plurality of life to flower around its small puncture-point. Icarus, much like Christ — titular subjects of their respective paintings — are no longer the overbearing, overdetermined despots of subject-object relations; rather, they serve as Archimedean vanishing points from which, and through which, the sentient world is allowed to breathe, to move, to come to vivid life. Majewski’s wisdom in following Bruegel’s example, situating his film in the pictorial depths that Bruegel walked through and discoursed upon, provides us with the felicitous occasion of watching the (cinematic) frame vanish and blend into the pictorial surface.

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5. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia — dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey)

There is a hilarious scene in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Distant (2002) when Mahmut, a middle-aged, successful photographer, treats his cousin Yusuf, a laborer from the countryside temporarily staying with him, to a screening of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Yusuf, ostensibly bored by the pensive film, excuses himself and retires to his room for the night; the more worldly Mahmut, now left alone, decides to eject Tarkovsky’s masterwork and slyly pops in a porn film (clearly part of the nightly routine for a bachelor used to living alone in an Istanbul apartment), all the while anxiously glancing over to Yusuf’s bedroom door in the fear that it should open and interrupt his secret pleasure. The comedy, of course, arrives when Yusuf does open the door and Mahmut quickly changes the channel — Yusuf, now interested in the television program, hovers over Mahmut, who pretends to channel surf randomly. The scene holds a lot of meaning within the thematic context of Distant, but I find it also curiously resonant in the leaps which Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s artistic career has taken. The disjunction, or should we say the distance, that divides the greatness of a film like Tarkovsky’s Stalker (or any of the immortal Russian’s films for that matter) from the lowness of the common porn film is about as immeasurable as Dante’s Paradiso was from the Inferno (Lars von Trier, another Tarkovsky acolyte, has frequently tried to bridge the two levels, the spiritual and the base, in several of his films). Ceylan’s humorous appropriation of Tarkovsky performed two functions: it brilliantly conveyed the vast gulf which separates the impenetrable formalism of great and timeless art from the contingencies and trivial demands of modern life (particularly, in Ceylan’s estimation, the kind of life lived in Istanbul or any other cosmopolitan city sunk into the disaffections of postmodernity); but the scene also projected, perhaps subconsciously, Ceylan’s evident aspirations to commit himself to an art worthy of Tarkovksy, a cinema, moreover, made profoundly difficult by the insuperable ordinaryness of situations.

4. Mysteries of Lisbon — dir. Raúl Ruiz (Portugal/France)

3. A Separation — dir. Asghar Farhadi (Iran)

2. Poetry — dir. Lee Chang-dong (South Korea)

1. The Turin Horse — dir. Bela Tarr (Hungary)

2011 was a fertile year for festival films, especially for well-established and world-renowned auteurs, a few of whom happened to produce some of their most vital work. Some interesting parallels arose: ruminations on the origin(s) of life contrasted with visions of an apocalyptic nature. The end of the world turned out to be an occasion to reflect back on its beginning. Other films were almost wholly involved in the different valences of the surface, either as an apparition of speed and tactility, or as an asylum from the immanent and consternating depths of the past. As usual, there are a number of films that won’t appear on our list simply because they were unavailable or were not released in time. But we are confident that we have selected among the very best; in fact, there were so many films that we loved, we had to expand the list to 20 entries (from last year’s 10). So, without further ado, here is the first part of Hydra Magazine’s Top 20 Best Films of 2011 (for Part Two, click here):

Reduced to its fundamental parts (a preternaturally sadistic prince abuses and terrorizes his subjects at his every whim, so a group of 13 samurai are secretly gathered in a conspiracy to kill/stop him at any cost), the plot goes no farther than “good guys go after the bad guy” — but this is precisely the reason why 13 Assassins works so well: it wastes no time to get to the meat of the action, of which the centerpiece is the 40+ minute final battle scene in which the 13 samurai take on an army of 130 soldiers. Part of the pleasure of the film is in discovering how the 13 manage to level their odds: where Seven Samurai quite famously developed engaging storylines by involving the villagers in the operation of the makeshift battle fortress they construct alongside their samurai protectors, Miike and his screenwriters, perhaps sensing their inability to recreate such a highly inimitable plot structure, choose to forgo too much exposition and dive right into the visual surprise of trick-shot battle tactics (but this is probably more due to the inherent design of Kaneo Ikegami’s original screenplay). A young boy’s fever dream undoubtedly, but one whose execution puts to shame the current stock of action and superhero films that are being made with three times the budget in Hollywood now (that said, there was probably no better pure summer action film than this one in 2011).

19. The Strange Case of Angelica – dir. Manoel de Oliveira (Portugal)
Manoel de Oliveira, as has been abundantly remarked upon, is still making films at the tender age of 103. Not only has he managed to continue working steadily since directing his first film in 1927, he has been producing films at a rapid pace. The Strange Case of Angelica, following quickly on the heels of its companion piece, Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (2009), only confirms the suspicion that Oliveira won’t be quitting anytime soon. Angelica is filled with a literary allusiveness that saturates its many frames and interiors. Beginning with a quotation from Antero de Quental and propelled by the verse of José Régio, the film covers a wide expanse of literary-historical landscape: it feels both antique and contemporary at the same time, like a 19th century short story furnished with the techno-aesthetic novelties of the early 20th. Angelica centers itself around the reanimating wonders of photographic art, but its fable concerns itself with the encroachment of the cinematic on a chimerical world divided into a series of rooms, frames, and landscapes. Interiors in Oliveira’s film seem to denote an artificiality made resplendent only through controlled light and photography, balanced on the other hand by the naturalistic landscapes of plein air scenery (most notably in several passages when the photographer, a young man named Issac [played by Ricardo Trepa], shoots pictures of day laborers singing and working on a hillside farm). If some feel that the film’s peculiar pacing carries an artificial dryness bordering on the unreal and the corny, I would answer that its strangeness relies precisely on this dryness and artificiality which Oliveira meticulously builds up frame by frame — Angelica‘s atmosphere of muted washed-out colors, anachronistic knick-knacks, and old portraiture only makes necessary the odd Méliès-style special effects that suddenly, but tastefully, lift the two dream lovers into the ether of early cinema.

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In contrast, the Claire section is impressively subtle and affective. Gainsbourg does an excellent job bringing real pathos to her performance. Though we are meant to be critical of Claire, who wants only to sit on the terrace with a nice glass of wine and what’s left of her family—(and they will have a little Beethoven playing in the background as they go!)—her sincerity, as empty as it is, is itself moving. As is the care she takes in selecting the perfect piece of chocolate for Justine, the person least likely to care, and the arrangement of the flowers by her bedside, and her futile attempts to take her young son somewhere, anywhere, as the world ends. She loads him into the golf cart and drives—fast—towards what? It doesn’t matter, but she needs to feel as if there’s a point to the driving. As she scurries around like an insect about to drown in a deluge, Justine looks on with digust. Now it is Justine who is the villain, not the planet careening through space to destroy our own. And through this, the ending offers a splinter of comfort. Justine, the ultimate nihilist, nevertheless offers something that is the closest thing to a revaluation of ritual that we will get out of von Trier. We will go on building our magic caves.

– Anelise Chen

Before the violent turning point, the anonymous “driver” or “kid” played brilliantly by Ryan Gosling suffers through at least half an hour of emotional awakening, stirred from the solipsistic confines of his shiny, enclosed vehicle, to the outwards overflowing of love for his too cute neighbor, Irene (Carey Mulligan), and his growing affection for her young son. I’ve already followed this propulsive narrative in terms of the stunningly beautiful synth-pop soundtrack, which sonically provokes  the cosmic expansion of the driver’s emotional sphere from an enclosed world of solipsism, but something is left to be said of director Nicolas Winding Refn’s play with themes of the human and machine, mechanical labor and violence, love and war. After all, the driver is a mechanic by day, a stunt devil during the fringes of his workday, and an amazingly expert get-away driver mercenary in the dark hours of the neon-lit night. His dawning love interest doesn’t so much pull him away from mechanical labor as transform his nuanced precision into even more incredible feats, expressed in what could count as heroic or even superhuman acts of violence, on the level of wars waged in epic romance, against those who threaten what’s gathered into his emotional sphere or resonance. But back to the soundtrack, you can now listen to two hours worth of Johnny Jewel’s unused tunes for an “imaginary film.”

These are interesting times indeed. When something we collectively call time is interrupted by a situation, when by situation we mean something that has moved although we know not yet in what direction, we have something very interesting developing. Lauren Berlant says a situation is a kind of time “in which a relation of persons is sensed to be changing but the rules for habitation and the genres of storytelling about it are unstable, in chaos.” Situation is interruption, a fiery bowl poured onto the sea.

A canister of pepper spray on a line of seated students: I see the video from UC Davis showing the officer whose name has not been released lowering a smooth and righteous handle of pepper spray from the sky to the students’ heads and faces. The nameless judge throws down upon them a sword of fire. It is evidently well practiced. I wonder how many others have swallowed his burning fist. An incident videotaped and an officer suspended doesn’t change certain facts.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AdDLhPwpp4

What brought Los Angeles to a breaking point in 1992 wasn’t just that famously grainy video but that that video finally revealed what had been experienced as the status quo for years. And the police seem to understand the terms of their relationship to an increasingly agitated group of disaffected people; so the status quo hasn’t changed, their defense of it has just learned to allow itself such excesses across a broader base. The end product, so to speak, is an antagonistic police force with an increasingly diminished compulsion to hide its use of excessive force. Notice how he raises the canister to the sky before lowering it with an air of grace over their lowered heads. So high that the four corners of the earth should see.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE0Uua7jnSA

And they would be gathered for battle, their number like the sand of the sea. And they would march up over the broad earth and surround the camp of the saints and the beloved city.

In college I took a translation course with Robert Hass. He was working on the Japanese Haiku of Basho and I was into doing some variety of Latin and Romance lyrics. Given as he was at that time to environmental concerns, his selections were pretty idiosyncratic and, likewise, my own probably reflected a range of interests limited to matters erotic if not blithely inebriated and esoteric. Something like a decade later, I read his opinion piece in the New York Times describing his assault by the Alameda County deputy sheriffs. The story of his wife thrown to the ground while he is bludgeoned in the ribs follows a string of similar stories and incidents: Women and the elderly pepper sprayed and beaten, military veterans killed, all kinds of people submitted to egregious uses of oppressive force. The videos I see show me an army who would kill but are at the moment content to maim. If I were taking Hass’ class today, my selections would be different. Ernesto Cardenal, Roque Dalton, and Pablo Neruda would be more pertinent voices.

I am surprised by the difference ten years can make to the social tick of the earth’s clock.

We have a situation here: And they marched up over the broad earth and surrounded the camp; but fire came down from heaven and consumed them and they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGf9wEIXMns

The weeds seem to laugh as they hit and slide on each other in the wind until the wind brings a fire upon their hissing bodies, a situation.

Hass’ editorial ends with the strange image of a tent lifted by helium balloons into the air, hovering over the plaza, “large and awkward,” he says, “occupying the air.” “Today and everyday,” echoes Geoffrey G. O’Brien, “we occupy the air.” And from one Abiezer Coppe again the injunction to “occupie the ayre.” After a recent post, I was criticized for comparing the voices of the occupy movement’s human megaphone to a hymn of ghosts, enchanting alien bodies to be re-chanted by alien windpipes. When air traverses the windpipe it is breath or spirit, the vital principal within living beings. In German “spirit” is geist, our etymological ancestor for “ghost,” of which Hegel says that communal forms of life are built. Geist, as he uses it, could also be translated as “mind,” if mind is understood to be operating at a higher level of existence than just self-awareness. “Spirit, so far as it is the immediate truth, is the ethical life of a nation: — the individual, which is a world.” This worlding of the individual occurs by a process of acculturation and, in moving his discussion to effective cultural objects, he defines culture as the “world of self-alienated spirit.” Although we might feel ourselves to be reflected in another person’s poetry, for example, we are not committed to it except insofar as we are bound to its alienations. Culture allows us, more generally, to reflect and, in doing so, enter a concrete actuality, a grounding effect. Spiritual substance brings us into actual reality. Geist is breath and is also mind, much like Donne’s spiritus or pneuma, (“Since thou and I sigh one another’s breath”), the motile air bringing body and mind together in the speaking voice. When air traverses the windpipe, it, also voice, likewise can be poetry. So I likewise repeat the injunction that we occupy the air.

And though they might stand at the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree, a vial of air will be released with a great voice out of the temple of heaven. And the voice will be as of many waters.

When a certain illusion is eroded, gnawed like a cliff-base by the sea’s persistent tooth, it will not be again stabilized. Who still believes (viz., gives spirit to) the fantasy that they are today there to serve and protect anything other than a system designed to serve and protect a privileged few? The number of violent police might be like the sand but the sand is not the sea, churning in its spirited contradictions, even swallowing the sand, if it will. These waters rush from the voice of the occupations. They are the churn of history, even as that churn might sicken the sick. They have become the intractable situation.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGKuX8akRzw

“There are people there with these amazing signs about their own lives: ‘My college fund got depleted, I was at city college, my ID is taped on here, and now I dont know what to do.’ Or ‘here is the summons and complaint that i received from Citibank and these are my kids and this was my house, and now these were my kids.’ It’s kind of upsetting but really nice…”

Something about the meme makes me recall David Lynch’s Interview Project, an online series of short video documentaries centering on the lives of “normal” people across America. In Interview Project’s 121 mini-biographies, the filmmakers (including Lynch’s son Austin) ask complete strangers piercing, existential questions. It is a source of ever-renewed wonder that each stranger has an answer, and that the answers are so often so rich and brimming with hard-luck stories and lived experience. Lynch describes the project’s production: “There was no plan, really. The team found people as they were driving along the roads, going into bars, different locations…. There they were. The people told their stories.”

Respectful, tender, sometimes funny — the Interview Project is similar in tenor to radio endeavors of this genre like This American Life and NPR’s Storycorp. They also share apparent purposes: to capture a cultural snapshot of America, to record individual oral histories and disseminate them online for the purposes of popular cultural consumption.

A common ethos of combating social atomization drives these projects, but I can only speculate as to the source of the alienation they contend with (narrowcasting? automobiles? capitalism?!?!?). I think about a fax that Don DeLillo sent to PEN American Center, and reorder his statements for my own purposes:

DeLillo: The world is becoming increasingly customized, altered to individual specifications. This shrinking context will necessarily change the language that people speak, write, and read. The question is whether the enormous force of technology, and its insistence on speeding up time and compacting space, will reduce the human need for narrative—narrative in the traditional sense.

I hypothesize: At the same time that the ways we can communicate with each other with increased frequency and across vast distances have proliferated and democratized, a certain sense of intimacy has disintegrated from our exchanges. I interpret these signs and projects — as well as the Occupations — as creative attempts at recreating that intimacy, experiments in stitching us back together.

Perhaps this communicative imperative will require us to return to older platforms like radio, which somehow retains the ability to broadcast as if from a confessional. The producers of Storycorp ban cameras from their recording booths – in part to prevent participants from becoming self-conscious, but also as an expression of the philosophy that the human voice is a vessel for the soul, and that to listen to the voice, in its simplest, purest form, is a way to honor the core humanity of an individual.

It is both impressive and quintessentially Lynchian that the Interview Project manages to do with physical appearance what Storycorp does with the human voice. Lynch’s work has never shied away from the oddities of physical features, whether beautiful, grotesque, or some combination of both. Interview Project similarly captures the singularity of physical appearance, reinforcing the sense of intimacy it conveys through the visual appreciation of details like the weave of a ratty couch, the emerging laugh line in a face, or the sweat dripping from a brow.

What does the physical occupation of a park contribute to the Occupy movement’s critique? I wonder this as I pass by the rows of tents in downtown Los Angeles set up blocks away from the cardboard dwellings that belong to the homeless denizens of skid row. I reread these words:

But in the case of public assemblies, we see quite clearly not only that there is a struggle over what will be public space, but a struggle as well over those basic ways in which we are, as bodies, supported in the world – a struggle against disenfranchisement, effacement, and abandonment.

…

For politics to take place, the body must appear. I appear to others, and they appear to me, which means that some space between us allows each to appear. We are not simply visual phenomena for each other – our voices must be registered, and so we must be heard.

…

This is not a matter of finding the human dignity within each person, but rather of understanding the human as a relational and social being, one whose action depends upon equality and articulates the principle of equality. No human can be human alone.

I pause for a moment on the word “abandonment,” reconsider Dan Savage’s “It gets better project,” and am newly struck by how significant a moment it is when an individual — and then tens of thousands of individuals — collectively engage in mini-biography, in personal storytelling via Youtube, for the express purpose of saving lives.

Listening to Storycorp, I consider the human microphone: (a) the emphasis it places on voice, on the word spoken back aloud; (b) Joseph Stiglitz’s awkwardness; (c) how a friend once told me about a couples’ counseling technique (reflection technique?) that requires one partner to repeat what she heard the other say before she may respond. If the human microphone is therapy, what is the pathology?

Storycorp creator Dave Isay has said he hopes the interview recordings he produces can be used to “teach civics and history and compassion.” I think of how Interview Project demands of the viewer a skill becoming swiftly obsolete: The ability to look your neighbor in the face. I consider the idea that the physical Occupation simulates a neighborhood, and decide that that is what makes me sad about it.

Is it ironic, or to the point, that these stories on paper, the visual representation of a banded-together 99% majority, are so personal and individual? Either way, something quite powerful that pulses at the heart of the Occupy movement would be cast aside if this intimate particularity were to be overwhelmed by any overarching dogma or action plan. For what these various audio-video projects indicate is a growing national need for people to share—and to hear—small stories of simple adversity and individual dignity, recollections of secret fears and small joys — standing independent of grand narrative, ideology, or aggregate justification.

The fear of closure will often lead toward interminable beginnings. In music composition, this fear can paralyze the composer and block rhythmic currents from ever reaching their sea; but in some musicians, the same fear can engender a kind of fruitful decay, a withering of petals whose downward fall can sometimes form seductive geometries. Hydra’s Michael Krimper stresses the latter symptom in his recent evaluation of the music of the Bay Area-based group, the Soft Moon:

Songs by the Soft Moon often begin in full throttle, as if they’ve already begun. They move forward carried by the sheer propulsive gravity of their engineered drum patterns — driving their gutted vehicles according to shapes and zigzags, towards endings that dissolve, break in static, submerge into chaos, or collapse abruptly as if the frequency on the radio has just changed or connection suddenly lost. Despite whatever glimmer of hope or flicker of light is carved out by the oscillating guitar strums and the burning synthetic melodies, the songs never find their way out of claustrophobia.

To read the full article, visit the San Francisco Bay Guardian. The Soft Moon just released the Total Decay EP on October 31st.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlTxrlkKzyI

In the final sequence of Michael Wadleigh’s 1981 film, Wolfen, three detectives are caught crossing the stock exchange steps at Wall Street by a pack of wolves. The wolves are predatory shapeshifters whose point of view is depicted with an in-camera thermographic effect similar to that used in Predator (McTiernan, 1985) to show the point of view of the extraterrestrial creature hunting the US special forces team sent to destroy rebel encampments in the Guatemalan jungle. The thermovisionary wolves have been descending from a wasteland South Bronx to kill the tycoons intent on transforming their decayed haunt to a high-rise luxury development. When they aren’t in their wolf form, these shapeshifters appear in human form as a group of Indians, presumably Mohawk or Iroquois, as they are at other times shown working on the high cables of the Brooklyn Bridge—special steel-working labor contracts were offered to the Mohawk and Iroquois when it was learned that they did not fear heights or dangerous conditions (Don Owen’s High Steel, 1965). They encircle the police on the steps, growling and baring their fangs amid filmic night mists.

The cop that reaches for his gun loses his hand to the leaping maw of one of the wolves. With his other hand he tries to radio backup to the stock exchange, when another wolf implausibly decapitates him with a split-second pounce. I suspect this is meant to suggest that wolves’ teeth are razor sharp as, earlier in the film, a wolf’s bite had been compared to a guillotine blade. The head rolls on the pavement, its mouth struggling to voice a last word.

The other two escape by sparking a massive explosion (again, implausibly) by firing two shots at the bumper end of a parked car; afterward making their way back to one of the dead tycoon’s luxurious if not gaudy penthouse homes. For a moment, the car and body are shown burning on Wall Street before we see the wolves arrive at the gaudy penthouse where the two detectives are hiding out. Dewey, the lead investigator, faces off with the lead wolf. A voice-over indicates that Dewey is now remembering what he had earlier been told at a dive frequented by the film’s Indians. “They can hear a cloud pass overhead, the rhythm of your blood,” said Eddie, the Indian leader, with a picture of Geronimo behind him, “they can track you by yesterday’s shadow; they can tear the scream from your throat.” Dewey drops his gun, raising his palms in a show of surrender to the shapeshifters. After he smashes a scale model of the high-rise luxury development planned for the Bronx, the wolves howl and leave. The final scene shows them running through their South Bronx haunt, still howling as the film fades out to the Indians atop the Brooklyn Bridge. Dewey is heard musing in a final voice-over: “In arrogance man knows nothing of what exists. There exists on earth such as we dare not imagine—life as certain as death, life that will prey on us as we prey on this earth.”

The wolves protest nothing; ultimately implacable, they return to rampage over what, in their minds, must already be occupied land. Furthermore, the ancient, thermovisionary perspective of the wolves is not the ideology lens-shift of They Live!. There is no symbol beneath the symbol. There isn’t even a simulation to be pierced, no master signifier to burn away at the edges. There is only heat and movement. Whatever dialectical polarity might be abstracted on them, it is already a foreign design. And you can’t occupy what is already under occupation. The wolves protest nothing. Of Geronimo, Edward Dorn wrote in his 1974 Recollections of Grand Apacheria: “Notorious through his opposition/To Alien authority/And by Systematic/And Sensational advertising/His Pleasures were widely known/As Depredations among the Invader//Eyes like two bits of obsidian/With a light behind them.” “In their eyes,” Dewey is told, “you are the savage.”

¤

Personally I am susceptible to a questionable line of thinking when it comes to what to read to rally yourself to revolution. In part it is because I am suspicious of rallies. But also because, when out in a mob, one can still reserve a right to ask what would Ezra Pound think? Confessing this odd impulse to James, as we recently attended the inaugurating protests at Occupy New Haven, he admitted that he did the same but instead replaced Ezra Pound with Robert Anton Wilson. We thought about it a few seconds and realized that essentially they would probably say the same thing—or at least what we are looking for is the thing that they would say that would be the same; something to do with blanket antagonism and a necessary fostering of chaos.

¤

It is a strange accident that the code name for the operation to capture Osama bin Laden was “Geronimo.” Several Native American tribes protested to this.

¤

I went down to Occupy Wall Street with Josh. The next day I received the below email from him:

Dear All,

Last night, I went down to NYC to check out Occupy Wall Street and attend a poetry reading being held there. I arrived at Liberty Plaza at 7:45 and the poetry reading was at 9. At 8:30, after having walked around the occupation, Edgar and I went for a drink and wrote poems to read. We stayed at the reading until 10:30.

The reading took place at the northwest corner of Liberty Plaza, close to Occupy Wall Street’s library boxes (plastic tubs filled with books). No microphone no megaphone and a loud organizational meeting about twenty yards away (and music twenty yards south of that). So a human megaphone was utilized: the speaker said a phrase, line or sentence and everyone close to the speaker chanted it back so those at a greater distance could hear. This was how the organizational meeting behind us was being conducted too. Most of what I have to say about the reading is determined by this fact. People read for 3-5 minutes, but everything took a while because of the crowd repeating back the phrases, lines or sentences. First names and some second names were written on pieces of paper, which were then collected in a cardboard box. The organizers pulled out a name and then you went up onto the steps.

Only two poets whom I saw read chose to go without this chanting (and neither actually *read*; they recited from memory). The first of these was a guy who read a poem about Neda Agha-Soltan called, I think, “What can be said;” the second was a woman who performed a poem about hooker school, dressed only in lingerie. Both were interesting performances, the second less inclined to bombastic language, but turned from satirically performed spoken language (conversations with cops and GRD instructors) to a somewhat earnestly delivered refrain of “your pussy is a sword, even if you don’t know it,” a phrase which seems to me to be making a few distinct arguments at the same time and invoking an archaic supposed poetic habitus of swords and sorcery, and my not buying all this makes me feel uncomfortable. But neither of these are what I want to talk about.

What I learnt at this event I am not sure I want to develop into any type of principal, but it does produce a truth I need to know. When you say a phrase and hear it said back, what falls away is the internal logic or complexity of the poem. One version of the poem only could be locked in, and this was very clear and conscious for me. To refuse the human megaphone, as I almost did, meant to invest the power of language to express suffering and argument only in the windpipe and bones of a single speaker, and not in the shared momentary voice of a crowd of people collected in Liberty Plaza, New York, on the 7^th October to peacefully protest against the current conditions of capitalism (I put this as vaguely as I can because I do not think even the vagueness of calling the occupation *anticapitalist* is vague enough). The logic of the poem belonged to the crowd. Every phrase was chanted back. Critical judgment was for me a secondary faculty. Primarily, I wanted to involve myself with how every phrase was an attempt to give voice to suffering, a condition of truth which could not be avoided for the reason that I simply was there, in attendance, and listening in the act of chanting. The unity of a poem was secondary to the unity of the line first read and the line chanted back; that a poem was a whole unit was knowable because the person standing on the steps a few yards away from you was the same person. This is to say, the reading became a joint project. The passion of an individual was unsustainable because the lines could not be held together, and no prosodic or tonal intensity could be worked up into music because the chants were near-monotone, the prosody necessarily slow and simple. The passion of the collective of reader-chanters-auditors was predicated on a (vague) political commitment. I don’t think it was a poet’s job, here, to provide passion in language to a political organization, with an individual’s language chanted out as emblematic of the spirit of an occasion. Instead, the reading became implicitly a religious-service-esque expression of conviction with respect to two things. First, that a repeated phrase belonged to the whole group (or language community) and must be known, without hesitation, as a voice for suffering. Second, that this language community was in fact speaking and thinking in a very precise language, so that words and phrases from various poems were immediately processed from English into smaller signifiers, with reference only to the geographical and historical context (even the Arab Spring was being reprocessed in my brain).

A man called Joseph went up second and read Prynne’s “The Corn Burned by Syrius,” the last poem of The White Stones. The first sentence of this poem reads:

……….Leave it with the slender distraction, again this
……….is the city shaken down to its weakness.

Potentially, these are two parallel statements either side of a comma and consciously either side of the verse turn, with the second line conditioned as a reiteration of the first: say “this,” what has just been said, “again.” At OWS, though, this sentence progressed logically. You leave the city into the minute exile of the occupation, away from the slender distraction which I heard as dollar bills, and the result is the city being shaken down to its weakness. The mutilation of life which distraction is suggested to be meets its counter force in the occupation, which shakes down the city, replacing the con-artist with the activist collective, bringing power down to its knees. Untrue. But longed for. The corrupt version of an ideal city does not imply backwards a moral imperative to “Leave”; the city is an actual city, New York, which has been left behind in the act of resisting business as usual. Contemporary praxis is no problem, but is instead a solution to real humans owning all the money. That is to say, no city nostalgia was even thinkable for me when these phrases were being chanted. The later lines “O how farre | art thou gone from thy Country, not being | driven away, but wandering of thine owne accord” (see Reitha Pattison’s commentary on this poem in Glossator on this quotation from Boethius’ Consolation) were interpreted (by me) in the context of the nationalism of the occupation (with people shouting things like “This country was built on liberty! Where’s the liberty? You’ve replaced it with slavery!” – when this great country was of course built on slavery). You (our political society and especially you, the bankers) have strayed far from the ideals of the grand USA, not because you have been forced to, but because proper regulations were never put in place. The city of New York becomes in transfigured in turn into an exile from the America of yore. I heard the lines as moving, delicate stuff, but the consciousness with which I received them wasn’t mine. The poem was a fracture of its form on the page. But the reading, for all its poverty, denounced the abyss, at the entrance to which is an instruction to words to abandon all feeling and experience of physical sounds. The liquid matter discovered is being worked into pebbles, not the hard rock of meanings which would compel us to make capitalism yield. If that should ever come, when that comes, it will be a very different event from OWS, but the discovery of these fractured rocks within the array of available political responses (Banks are bad! Stop the bailouts! Money shouldn’t rule, so just separate money from the state! The banks are the new John Bull!) is a prologue toward possibilities.

I feel compelled to stand with the badness of the poetry as much as I feel I ought to be disgusted by the bad interpretations of poems forced on me by the context. Attending to the feeling and sound of every utterance was the virtue of the occasion. The wrong way I heard poems, in the fragmented whole of the evening, is something that perhaps may be correctable by a poetry that learns from this (I certainly didn’t know what the chanting would do to the event). If the poetry readings continue and continue to be amplified by chanting, this may happen; if so, the interpretive consciousness produced in that corner of Liberty Plaza may do some good for the whole occupation. As it is, I think the fragmented-feel-good thinking of OWS at the moment constitutes how poetry exists there too. This is not to say I do not admire what is being done.

Best, Josh

¤

I thought about Josh’s letter for a few days, turning it over in my head, trying to tease out the specific anxieties underpinning it. I remembered the poems he mentioned, the one about Neda Agha-Soltan, a stirring recitation by a man who filmed all the poets who read. And also the one by a woman who recited her poem in her underwear, a poem about a well educated prostitute and the problematic situation when the court mandates she go to “hooker school;” that is, get the GED the prosecution presumes she doesn’t have. There were, in retrospect, two women on display in these recitations—the woman’s body for sale for all to see and the woman we all saw, dying on the streets of Tehran. One uncovered and one covered, one pressured and one released. And still they were both there, together under a totem of poetry or performance, standing for the fundamental contradiction that some must live while others die, even as death seems so far away. I thought about why Josh took issue with the refrain, “your pussy is a sword,” not so much because it was hard for me to imagine how a pussy could be a sword, but because there are much more violent weapons of destruction hanging over our heads and shooting into people’s bodies. Even if Neda had had a sword, would it have done any good against the bullet that blasted inside her chest? Around this time, I came across a passage from Mike Davis that told of one financier’s peculiar obsession: “When the Federal Resolution Trust Corporation seized the assets of Columbia Savings and Loan Association they discovered that the CEO, Thomas Spiegel, had converted its Beverly Hills headquarters into a secret, ‘terrorist-proof’ fortress. In addition to elaborate electronic security sensors, a sophisticated computer system that tracked terrorist incidents over the globe, and an arms cache in its parking structure, the 8900 Wilshire building also has Los Angeles’ most unusual executive washroom: Tom Spiegel’s office, in addition to the bullet-proof glass, was designed to have an adjoining bathroom with a bullet-proof shower. In the event an alarm was sounded, secret panels in the shower walls would open, behind which high-powered assault rifles would be stored.” When facing the banks, one suspects a poem would make more sense if it said a woman’s pussy should be a high-powered assault rifle.

¤

Rereading Blake’s “America, a Prophesy” could be interesting in light of recent events.

¤

I thought about the letter again when walking alongside the Occupy New Haven encampment a few nights ago. It was late night and the denizens of the tents set up on the city’s green were mic checking, or calling out for each others’ voices with a radiating human megaphone. From the far side of the green, I could hear a fainter “mic check” than the one that followed it and than the one that followed that one, “mic check!” There was no speech or assembly being prepared for. They were voices checking for each other through the dark, misty park. Like the bodies of the dead buried beneath them in the green, they sent out wandering specters to ensure each other that they were still around. Chanting their voices toward alien bodies, they enchanted those bodies to be re-chanted by alien windpipes. I disagree that this is the voice of a crowd. It is a hymn of ghosts.

¤

“You don’t have the eyes of the hunter,” Dewey is told, “you have the eyes of the dead.”

¤

It’s true—a man did read J.H. Prynne’s “The Corn Burned by Syrius” at the Occupy Wall Street poetry assembly. On his feet at the citadel’s threshold, the reader ghost-hymned a dream of departure. It is necessary first of all to disentangle the citadel from the nation, as it has already done so, in order explain why the reader was even holding his vigil on the steps of a financial stronghold and not, as the Bonus Army did in 1932, on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol. In dreaming of self-possessed exile, he paradoxically came to the heart of the citadel, its market and tables of exchange. In a strange way, however, it seems that one can feel most far away when most near an intolerable thing. We can imagine that he had money in his pocket, if not a debit card. And nonetheless there he was making outward motions with his arms. But could his hands be unmarked anyway, as far down the sloping grasses as he might take them, so long as he went with the citadel on his horizon?

And if he discovered in his exile the “fractured rocks” which Josh identifies as “a prologue toward possibilities” does he hurl them with a poem or not? And, if so, is he throwing them at the same abyss at which they were thrown in Cairo or Rome? “The so-called revolutions of 1848 were but poor incidents—small fractures and fissures in the dry crust of European society. However, they denounced the abyss. Beneath the apparently solid surface they betrayed oceans of liquid matter, only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock.” I recently heard Slavoj Zizek echo Marx’s point: “The system has lost its self-evidence, its automatic legitimacy. And now the field is open.”

¤

I am peeved by the supposition that circular-time as we understand it is somehow autochthonic to the Americas. That idea of time comes from the industrial circuit of endlessly repetitious monotony or monochronicity (emblematized by the wrist watch). Indigenous time is more like a loom-piece. “Their world is older,” Dewey is told, “more finished; more complete.”

Indeed the indigenous dialectics that I am familiar with are often based on crisscrossing and colliding lines of history. Americans could do with a better sense of line.

¤

In an exchange of emails on chaos and circular movements, I sent the below passage (the last paragraph from Heriberto Yépez’ El Imperio de la Neomemoria, 2007) to Jose-Luis and Oscar:

Desordenándose unos a otros, resistiendo influjos de la otredad, desigualándose, el alterverso mantiene su libertad, su descarga. Lo irreversible es la verdad. Nuestras prácticas, ideas y fantasías sociales acerca del funcionamento del cosmos bajo un mismo juego de leyes es otro más de los espectros de nuestro pensamiento totalitario. Hemos pensado al caosmos como si fuera un Estado total. La noción de un “Universo” es la de una detestable omnisistema absolutista, cuyas leyes todo lo encadenarían a través de la eternidad. Autoengaño y engullimiento, abondonar la idea de la existencia de una Totalidad, puesto que la caótica es la prueba definitiva de la existencia de la libertad. Para que yo sea Soberano deben dejar de existir todas las Leyes Generales. Sé que negar la existencia del Universo es un absurdo; por ser absurdo, lo asevero. El Universo jamás ocurrirá.

I translate the passage thus:

Throwing itself here and there into disorder, resisting the influences of otherness, unbalancing itself, the alterverse maintains its liberty, its charge. What is irreversible is true. Our practices, ideas and fantasies with respect to the workings of the cosmos under one set of laws is another specter of our totalitarian thinking. We have imagined the cosmos a total State. The notion of a “Universe” is a detestably absolutist omnisystem, whose laws would shackle everything by means of an eternal. Self-deception and gullibility need abandon the idea of the existence of a totality, as chaos is the ultimate proof of the existence of liberty. For me to reign sovereign in this, all General Laws must cease to exist. I know that denying the existence of the Universe is an absurdity; so, as to be absurd, I declare it. The Universe will never come to be.

¤

A fractional-reserve banking system increases the money pool by lending a multiple of what it actually has. For all the deposits a bank receives, it keeps only a fraction of those deposits as reserves. Deposits are widely understood to be in the form of money or currency. But a parallel banking system exists, known as the “shadow banking system,” which is a misnomer because it operates openly and liberally. Trading in debt via packages such as hedge funds, money market funds and structured investment vehicles, this banking system is harder to control because it trades in forms of credit doing the service of money. The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 made it easier for these banking systems to collude. In the years leading up to the banking crisis of 2008, banks borrowed from short-term liquid markets, subsequently multiplying the money pool to invest in long-term, risky illiquid assets (such as mortgage-backed securities); the same person that dips a hand to pull money from one purse uses their other hand to drop the funds into an unregulated, risky investment. This is also known as a diversion of funds for speculative operations, in so far as the parallel investment is secured by nothing and, on the other hand, the bank accepting deposits continues to require cash to go about its daily business. Either it has to continue taking risks to increase an available pool of cash (for its depositors and, of course, its operators) or it teeters on the brink of bankruptcy with the hopes of being rescued by some larger entity.

Any corruption stemming from such an enterprise isn’t as much a matter of greed as it is of a flawed system. Although, nevertheless, the system was designed.

Furthermore, when a money pool is multiplied from its multiples (the funds lent at a multiple of what a bank actually holds can be re-received as deposit to count in the fraction that it needs to be considered as holding reserves; so can likewise be re-multiplied), it makes money a linguistic exponent, only ever realizing itself as a greater abstraction. Braving absurdity, I say that the money you hold has never actually been.

¤

In any event, here’s a poem:
What we forget we remember
in more whole form
……….this is how
came about the universe
the sky dropping
like a honeysuckle rose
into the hand
from which it stemmed, a hand
stopping over a keyboard
to tap one key just once
but then to walk away
and what of apocrypha have we
……….to say or speak to
the story of the fish who ate
the sea or the rabbit
who swallowed the limbless fish
……….the tide is itself
its opposite and forcible bend
the people pushing toward refutation
………………..meagre push
while the eel dreams of limbs
and a desk is washed out
……….by its time, out
………………..to inscription
that in memory it remain
hopeful of these things
though hidden they delay, evacuate
…………………………or protest

¤

“They can see two looks away.”

.

The pre-cinematic origin of Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011) holds residence at an unlikely (and resistant) site of historiography: the mental breakdown of Friedrich Nietzsche. Whether the facts of Nietzsche’s breakdown in Turin are as true as one anecdotal legend claims, the narrative details are compelling enough to stand forth as fiction: “In Turin, on January 3rd, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the door of number six, Via Carlo Alberto, perhaps to take a stroll, perhaps to go by the post office to collect his mail.” The mundaneness of the incidentals, in which Nietzsche assumes the role of an ordinary man who ponders two equally banal choices (to take a leisure walk, or to pick up the mail? or why not both?), augments the pull of the inevitable catastrophe. “Not far from him, or indeed very far removed from him, a cabman is having trouble with his stubborn horse.” The cabman begins to whip the horse viciously because it refuses to budge and convey its load, and Nietzsche, overwhelmed by the sudden violence and pathos of the event, rushes to the horse’s aid, throws himself on its neck, and prevents the cabman from flogging it any further. Nietzsche, perhaps feeling underneath his arms and face the rippling skin and pulsing heart of the animal, breaks down in convulsive tears and, as a crowd collects around him, submerging him further beneath the heat of an encounter which has escalated beyond the point of comprehension, he collapses unconscious. The rest, as they say, is history: carried back to his apartment, the philosopher wakes up, but he can no longer function as he had; that is, he can no longer make autonomous decisions about taking either leisure strolls or visits to the post office, or anything else for that matter. He lives out the rest of his years in a state of profound philosophical silence, “only broken on occasion by a lengthy and unpunctuated scream.”

Bela Tarr

As scripted by Tarr and his regular screenwriter, the great Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the unfounded but no less evocative event of “the flogging of the Turin horse” signals the terminus of Nietzsche’s life as a philosopher, though not the end of his life as an all-too-human man (he still would live on for another eleven years under the care of his mother and, later, his sister Elisabeth). Tarr’s film uses Nietzsche’s dramatic exit from public life as the point of departure: of what happened to Nietzsche, reduced to the state of being a “gentle and demented” man, we presumably know enough. But to Tarr and Krasznahorkai a greater historical lacuna emerges: “Of the horse…we know nothing.” The nearly five minute tracking shot that opens The Turin Horse immediately answers the query in a stridently phenomenological manner: the horse materializes right before us, and we see it has finally recovered from the Nietzsche episode and moved onward. The speckled horse pulls its driver with grim but determined velocity through a cold skeletal landscape that promises no end in sight. Moving Sisyphus-like toward a destination that lies somewhere beyond the screen (a liminal place that might be located somewhere at the far end of the world), its heavy but forceful movement seems to occur in a vacuum, a progress that is abjured by the eskhaton of nonprogress, Zeno’s impossibility of movement. The horse moves because it is forced to, but inwardly, we may say, the horse does not move; its muscular nature is still and timorous perhaps, and though solidly built, it resigns itself to a deathlike trance made stark by its inability to abdicate the cruel task assigned to its strained legs, its aching back impelled by the whips and grunts of a stubborn but hardworn and similarly bestial man. Man and animal are one in their movement forward.

All throughout this eternalized march, Mihaly Vig’s solemn funereal music envelops us (as it will continue to envelop us throughout the film, as a doom-ridden leitmotif), and we are transported by the fluid camera that swivels around the horse and keeps pace with its advance (as if it were tied to the magnetic pole of the horse’s moving sphere), and we are transported by the horse itself on a darkening passage into the closed world of Tarr’s film. It goes without saying that the first shot of The Turin Horse (much like the first shot of many of Tarr’s films) constructs the whole architectural valency of the film in miniature, only this time in an inverse relation: the action-event of the horse’s trudge through an eternalized landscape turns out to be the positive topside of what gradually develops into an entropic negativizing of the scenario. The film moves, as one critic has astutely pointed out, from the “pure movement of cinema” to “the absolute stasis of photography.” (One is tempted to add: from the animism of the cinema to the spectral entombment of the photograph.)

 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=v32n4lCG0OA

 

The march of the horse from the historiographical site of Nietzsche’s departure from world history (or should we call it rather his dramatic entrance?) to the ahistoric realm of Tarr’s picture, in which the horse-driver and his daughter dwell in their own phenomenological vacuum, constitutes a suspension of dramatic impulse within the slow freeze of the film’s gaze. The horse, which we just witnessed trudging determinedly toward us, refuses during the next “six days” of the film’s arc (each chapter is divided into separate days) to pull the cart-wagon again. Just as it had done in a parallel universe one innocuous day on a cobblestone street in Torino, the horse respectfully declines the apparatus of its vocation; it prefers not to perform its job, we may say, because it senses an ending on its way to arriving, a metaphysical “dead brick wall” past which it cannot imagine moving. The horse’s refusal is the first decisive act of the film, or rather, the hinge on which the film shifts from the ostentatious mobility of the tracking shot to the reciprocally stringent anchoring of the film in the inertia of domestic life. The horse’s sad refusal ties us down to its stable life and, concomitantly, to the rustic cottage inhabited by the horse-driver and his daughter. The story shifts from “Of the horse…we know nothing” to “Of the carter, and of his life at home, we also know nothing.” But these two focal points soon become merged: man and animal are also at one in their habitation.

After nearly twenty minutes of non-dialogue, we learn to the full what kind of meager, bone-dry existence the carter and his daughter endure. We perceive that the carter relies on his horse as the primary means of eking out a paltry economic subsistence, and that he relies on his daughter, in lieu of the absence of a wife or partner, to dress and feed him since he is lame in his right arm. The daughter, on her end, seems to enjoy no private life other than the absent-minded pleasure of staring out her window for extended periods of time; that is, when she is not stoking the fire, pulling water from the well, dressing and undressing her father, feeding the horse, cleaning the stable, and boiling potatoes for what seems to be their only meal of the day. Father and daughter rise early and, when darkness comes, they go to bed early — not to sleep, but to bide the reprieve that structures their waking hours. They do not speak much to each other, and their lack of words posits a life emptied of reflection or introspection, indeed of personal history and historical insight. The rituals that formulate their existence, and which are dictated by the objects and material conditions that restrict them to the bare essentials, are ultimately what define their severely curbed form-of-life, a life simultaneously bounded by the interiority of the austere cottage they call a home and by the ascetic cinematic space in which Tarr gives them limited range to dwell, sleep, and eat in.

But I must digress a little. The term “bare life” has specific significance, and it owes its recent conceptual resurgence to the work of Giorgio Agamben. In his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben explains that since the Ancient Greeks had no term that could equate to our contemporary usage of the all-inclusive word life, they “used two terms that, although traceable to a common etymological root, are semantically and morphologically distinct: zoe, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group” (1). For Aristotle, zoe was excluded from consideration in the life of human beings: people were fundamentally thinkers whose form of thought, and not the mere fact of their living, defined their existence. But in the nebulous zone that sprouted between zoe (bare life) and bios (political existence), as human civilization grew more and more complex, a modern incarnation of man as containing both bare life and, in Michel Foucault’s words, harboring “the additional capacity for political existence,” became feasible. Political man was gradually recontextualized as a “human animal” who was still subject to the sovereign power of the polis or state apparatus as its resident or citizen, but who remained eternally suspect on account of his potential regression to the bare life of animals, vegetables, and things.

The proposition that existence stands higher than a just existence is false and ignominious, if existence is to mean nothing other than mere life… Man cannot, at any price, be said to coincide with the mere life in him, no more than with any other of his conditions and qualities, not even with the uniqueness of his bodily person. However sacred man is (or that life in him that is identically present in earthly life, death, and afterlife), there is no sacredness in his condition, in his bodily life vulnerable to injury by his fellow men. What, then, distinguishes it essentially from the life of animals and plants? And even if these could be sacred, they could not be so by virtue only of being alive, of being in life. It might be well worth while to track down the origin of the dogma of the sacredness of life. Perhaps, indeed probably, it is relatively recent, the last mistaken attempt of the weakened Western tradition to seek the saint it has lost to cosmological impenetrability.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPpJoTmIeuc

But bare life, mere sentience, is only one part of the puzzle of inclusion/exclusion in the architecture of The Turin Horse. The severity of the fading world winnows down their actions to the level of what Benjamin calls “mythical violence”: the violence which does not necessarily destroy laws or destroys life but which founds an order of things that must be patiently and habitually built up, again and again, day after day; a violence that is also a kind of law-making and law-keeping, the law of ritualized actions; the minor laws of domestic space and the major laws of boundaries and boundary-setting. (With this in mind, we can begin to understand the carter’s hostility toward or distrust of foreigners and strangers who visit his abode, those who trespass over the boundaries he set up or who force him into reactive thinking: “It is rubbish.”)

For a film that is so devoid of dramatic event and cataclysm, it is also one which problematizes the effects of critical appraisal despite its clarity of execution and the exhausting repetitiveness of its rituals. Tarr’s aesthetics of maximalized minimalism produces a disorientation involving its repetitions. The soundtrack, but also the framing of the scenes and the daily actions of the duo, are replayed over and over again, each day no different from the last except for the rare intrusions of other characters or the deprivation that comes with the reduction of their resources, of their water supply, of their hunger, of even the light that comes with each new day, and which disrupts the regularity of their domestic actions and behavior. The inclusiveness of these ceremonies of domesticity reciprocates the exclusiveness of each individual movement in the bare life of these apolitical people.

Just as Tarr and his crew had memorably performed in Satantango (1994), we revisit some of the same set-pieces but from different perspectives and angles (except that in The Turin Horse, each set-piece constitutes another day in chronological order, whereas in Satantango the scenes comprise a single chronological event re-seen from different points of view). The event of eating the boiled potatoes with their bare hands (and which scene signals more than this one the grounding of the carter and his daughter in the residuals of bare life?) is played numerous times, each time from a different perspective, i.e. from the daughter’s point of view, and then from the father’s point of view, and then from the side showing both of them looking upon each other, and so forth. Just as he accomplished in Satantango, Tarr submits us to a cinema of physical endurance, at once below cinema, but also qualitatively beyond its spectacle; a cinema in which we are bodily committed not as spectators but as participants in the rituals that constitute the very surface of the image. It is possible to consider the belaboring of each ritual to carry the purpose of causing us to suffer with them the ennui of each passing day, in which the same actions are performed ad infinitum (or until they or we perish); but I am more drawn to believe that each ritualistic repetition, because it is seen from a different perspective or angle, reconstitutes the event as a qualitatively different phenomenon quite distinct from the last; not only are the multiple repetitions of the potato eating different in kind, but they are also different in potentiality.

But what do these repetitions mean in relation to the aesthetic intentions of The Turin Horse? Its simplicity pushed to the point of absurdity foams at the mouth in Zarathustrean complexity. Its major inclusion, or should I say, its chief visibility, is that of the bare life of the carter (who I shall now call, archetypally, the patriarch) and that of the bare life of the daughter. Removed from political existence, indeed only barely clinging to the faintest lineaments of domesticity and civilization, they appear to be inhabiting a corner of the world at the margins of an apocalyptic event, in which human language, the foundation of political existence as such, is aborted and dispersed, quite literally, to the sound and bluster of the wind. These two people are only barely removed from animal existence, not in any pejorative sense, but in a way that is at once political (i.e. material) and metaphysical. It is to this extent that, quoting Agamben, “there is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion” (8). So that the major exclusion, or rather, the film’s key invisibility, happens to be that of the political autonomy which has been denied to them. This is not simply to say that The Turin Horse is not a political film, but that its politics is compounded with the gestures and limitations of material disappearance; it is a film about the end of history and the consumption of a world order, perhaps even of the end of the world as we know it, not in a bang, but in a whisper. In short, it is a film about Nietzsche and about the ponderous silence in which he became submerged.

To return to our beginning: of the horse we know nothing, but the film makes it a point to put the horse and its dependents front and center; their exclusion from history automatically becomes the major inclusion in the film. Reciprocally, of Nietzsche we pretend to know enough; but it is his dramatic inclusion in the history of human civilization which Tarr/Kraznahorkai invert into an overwhelming invisibility in the film. A dialectic of presence/absence ensues. Nietzsche’s very absence in the film becomes an overbearing presence; he is the eraser in the book of history, and it is his thought process which slowly deadens the light, one would say, and makes impossible the virtuous powers of political sovereignty in a world gone abysmally absurd.

But this is only one way of looking at it. Another way is to reconsider the cumulative effect of the repetitions in the film. A few reviewers have already alluded to the Beckettian overtones that the repetitions play out. Two of the best reviews of the film (by Robert Koehler, the other by Andrew Schenker) utilize the classic ending line of Beckett’s The Unnameable as a pithy summation of the attitude conveyed in The Turin Horse: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” — but a study of the literary work of Kraznahorkai would suffice on its own to explain how Tarr hit upon these existential tonalities without having to read Beckett. In any case, Beckett (and Kraznahorkai), both in their stylistics of prose and in their fundamental attitude, paint the gateway through which the film sets up Nietzschean games of absence/presence. I perceive instead something of a recreation of the concept of the eternal return, one of the most misunderstood and misquoted tropes of Nietzsche’s thought (see The Gay Science). Gilles Deleuze provides a supple explanation:

We misinterpret the expression “eternal return” if we understand it as “return of the same.” It is not being that returns but rather returning itself that constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed of becoming and of that which passes. It is not some one thing which returns but rather returning itself is the one thing which is affirmed of diversity or multiplicity. In other words, identity in the eternal return does not describe the nature of that which returns but, on the contrary, the fact of returning for that which differs. This is why the eternal return must be thought of as a synthesis; a synthesis of time and its dimensions, a synthesis of diversity and its reproduction, a synthesis of becoming and of the being which is affirmed in the becoming, a synthesis of double affirmation. (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 45)

Elsewhere, Deleuze rejects the term “mechanism” for describing what shape the eternal return takes form. “Why is mechanism such a bad interpretation of the eternal return? Because it does not necessarily or directly imply the eternal return. Because it only entails the false consequence of a final state.” The term mechanism resonates, I think, in Tarr’s film: it is precisely the kind of word one would use not only in describing its mechanical repetitions, but also in general consideration of what cinema does as an artform (the cinema is, in a superficial sense, the result of a variety of mechanisms at work). Yet this temptation to restrict or malign its repetitions as the result of a mechanism compounds the genius of the film for me: in spite of the logical resonance, I find myself unable to compare Tarr’s cinema of repetitions, such as they appear in The Turin Horse, to a mechanical process of “passing through the same set of differences again.”

The activation of the body in being laid bare by Tarr’s film defies or circumvents mere mechanical rotation or repetition; one is gradually weaned off the idea of “spectacle” and the body becomes the central event of the film’s “eternal return.” (“We must eat,” the patriarch says, because the body, ground degree zero for all versions of political existence, zoe or bios, is what ultimately matters.) The body in its full erosion represents, and quickly absorbs, the germ of the screen: we are also attempting to return to ordinary life, but its mundane ceremonies have been permanently affected, have undergone transmutation. After watching The Turin Horse, we cannot so simply “return” to life again; our conception of life has been transformed, its entrails slashed open. In the sense that Deleuze admonishes the description of the eternal return as a mechanical process, we are also encouraged to refuse labeling Tarr’s repetitions as mechanisms of the cinema. We are subliminally entering a zone of synthetic possibilities; we are placed beyond the cinema, in a curious state of exception, yet very much a part of the cinema, insofar as our body is heavily weighted with the experience of its totalizing, self-effacing image.

Describing “the abyss and the apotheosis” of Nietzsche’s final year of coherence before his mental breakdown, Pierre Klossowski writes, “Now he saw the world beyond language: was it the sphere of absolute muteness, or on the contrary the sphere of absolute language?” (Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, 251). This is the question which The Turin Horse asks not only of what Nietzsche glimpsed that fateful day in Torino, but also of what the patriarch and his daughter witnessed shortly before the end of the world arrived at their doorstep. The film’s shift from the sphere of absolute cinema to the sphere of total photography works as a correlative to the Nietzschean shift, but it also summons an inversion of its own mechanics: an entropic shift from an ending to a beginning. In the beginning, that is to say, at the multiple originary sites of cinema, there were already present the mechanisms of its destruction, a state of “sacredness” (in the Agamben sense) which plays out as an affirmation intent upon going mad, going bare, “becoming animal.” This is because what is repeated is affirmed, is active, is perpetually on its way to actualizing a truer, fundamentally different non-identity:

Only action and affirmation return: becoming has being and only becoming has being. That which is opposed to becoming, the same or the identical, strictly speaking, is not… We can thus see how the eternal return is linked, not to a repetition of the same, but on the contrary, to a transmutation. It is the moment or the eternity of becoming which eliminates all that resist it. It releases, indeed it creates, the purely active and pure affirmation. (Nietzsche and Philosophy, x)

In some ways, Tarr’s stated decision to not make any more films after The Turin Horse signifies a noble resumption of the Nietzschean concept of affirmation. The film’s last gasp is no true gasp, it recedes rather into unostentacious silence, and the images of the two archetypes, Patriarch and Daughter, become a pure affirmation that performs a double act: the will to nothingness, transmuted to the will to power, consummates itself, that is, negates its own negation; while the will to power, fulfilling the desire of a nihilism that wishes to vanquish itself, allows it to become pure nihilism, a nothingness, that allows the body, our bodies, to return to life, to make their recurrence in the world which lies beyond cinema.