BarryTaylorBlog

messing with minds

Danny Boyle's latest movie, post Slumdog Milionaire, came out this week. It is very much a 'Danny Boyle' picture, creative and vivid cinematography, wonderful editing, nail-biting tensions, bits of graphic-edge-of-seat-gruesomeness, insanely delicious soundtrack and a really interesting story.

I suppose it's closest film comparison would be Inception, in that they are both essentially crime-drama, film noir with psychological twist. There's a lot to be said for that comparison. Although as the film unfolded I was continualy reminded of a lecture I attended by Antonio Damasio on his book, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. The film which is about an art-auctioneer embroiled with thieves, who has experienced amnesia and must recover the memory of a lost piece of art, covers many of the questions Damasio raised in that lecture about identity, memory and the like> The film explores these perennial ideas--probably raising more questions than answers, but keeping things moving by constantly baiting and switching the audience as to who the 'bad guys' really are. As the film explores the rapidly changing dynamics of the story by using parallel images, reflections, alternate scenarios, you get the sense that the film is also messing with the viewers capacity to rely on their onw memeory to unravel the story.

Some of it was predictable and a bit pedestrian, but I still came away feeling like I needed to go back and watch again--it has that Memento/Inception mind-fuck thing going, which I personally find quite compelling.

What is memory, how is it constructed and can it be manipulated? Would seem to be central questions the film raises--I am not sure there is any consensus on any of those questions and I am not certain the film gives much clarity, other than to say that memory is a construct and a vulnerable one at that. Encoding, storing and retrieving memory are fascinating concepts and riddles at the same time--memory makes, gives us a sense of who we are and helps us to locate ourselves in time and space, Trance plays with all of that and more. I think we want certainty on these issues because we recognize the vulnerability when we forget--this is the dilemma of the film's central character--he is desparate to remember and resorts to hypnosis, but this leads him deep into the confusing world of memory and the manipulative power of suggestion, and the 'truth' becomes even more elusive. This sort of film can be quite unsettling at times, but it's well worth the discomfort.

italo calvino

 

Had he not passed away so suddenly of a cerebrl hemorrage in 1985, the Italian writer Italo Calvino would have been 89yearsold today. I like Calvino's work and have found two pieces of his work helpful in some of the work/teaching I do. I use his book, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, which tells a series of tales using tarot cards as the framework, in one of my ad school classes as an exercise telling stories with images rather than words. Six Memos for the Next Millenium, which was drawn from a set of lectures he was due to give at harvard at the time of his death, was central in some of my thinking when I was in the middle of shaping my doctoral thesis. The six memos: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and well...you'll have to read to discover the last one--it was unfinished at the time of his death, which only serves to make th ebook even more helpful--formed part of the framework of my method.

I came across this little film on the always necessary, Brain Pickings. 

after the apocalypse

I have been thinking a fair bit about this fascination that there seems to be with the idea of post-apocalypse, post-technological collapse. It's evident in things as diverse as The Hunger Games, The Walking Dead andnow, even more, the new JJ Abrams produced, Revolution, which explores the world post-electricity. It seems to echo the on-going love/hate relationship we have with technology. On the one hand we are enraptured with what technology can accomplish and how connected it allows us to be, and what it can deliver, literally into our hands. On the other hand, we speak a lot about the downside of technology-the loss of face-to-face communing, i-pod isolation, hyper-individualized mediation, and these shows seem to be wrestling with those duelling forces at work in our lives.

I begin a class next week on Theology and Media Culture and I might begin with this question, this issue, in the class, get us thinking about the role/s technology plays in enhancing and diminishing our lives. There is an interesting article in Esquire magazine online about this very thing--a worthwhile read. This is something that Marshall Mcluhan addressed with his laws of media tetrad, putting forward the view that technology, any technology, causes four major effects upon the user-it (whatever it is)enhances, retrieves, reverses and obsolesces. We seem to live somewhere in the tension between those dynamics, each of us being pulled by various preferences, positions, access etc. 

There are often times when I would happily give up my cell-phone, but the idea of going back to a pre-electric world--one that would also herald a return to the 'dark' in so many other areas, is not one that I care to visit. I think we have to find our own balance with technology and its use, misuse, disuse.

Much like Hunger Games--Revolution presents a sort of frontier-survivalist mentality--both interestingly, are heavily led by females--the girl with the crossbow in the NBC ad would not look out of place at all in the HG artworks, advertising and narrative ideology--this idea of living close to the land, technology-free, surviving off of ones wits and ancient-or older, close-to-earth wisdom, holds great appeal.

We rely so much on technology--and for most of us, most of it is a mystery in terms of how it actually works--i'm still stuck on radio-waves!!! Derrida used this idea to great degree in his writing on knowledge and our relation to technology. For him, the space created between our reliance upon and ignorance of, technology, was precisley the cause of a revived and renewed interest in animis, magic and mystery--i.e. religious belief is affected by technology relation.

And of course, all these shows draw heavily upon the American Obsession with all things apocalyptic--which continues to be expressed at the heart of much of our culturally mediated imagination. Oh, and AC/DC are still cool!

the story of stuff

 

I'm back in 'advertising mode.' History of advertising is this terms focus. Here's an interesting project called The Story of Stuff--about where things come from and where they go

valtari #9 sigur ros

Continuing their delicious Mystery Film Experiment, Sigur Ros release another short, this time an animated film by Dash Shaw and John Cameron Mitchell of Hedwig fame. The music is beautiful, the video? Well watch for yourself.

feltron bomb!

 

I have collected infographic stroyteller Nick Felton's annual reposts for the past few years, here's a great presentation about his creative process. You can track him here.

lawless; a murder ballad

I went to see Lawless yesterday. Its the latest film from John Hillcoat, based on a book by Matt Bondurant about his family in Prohibition-era Virginia. Hillcoat's previous film was the wild and violent, Proposition--set in the Australian outback, and featured, much like this film, the challenging and sometimes painful interactions between brothers. Family dynamics and relational ties and disconnects drive both films. What these films also share in common in the presence of Nick Cave. Cave wrote the story for The Proposition and did the music with Warren Ellis. The two of them did the music for Lawless, and this time Cave adapted the book into a screenplay. It is brutally and disquietly violent at times--not in a particularly hyperreal mode like Tarantino or any summer blockbuster of late, but violent in the visceral, bone-crunching, up-close and deeply personal way that violence is used--it's just presented as part of life in a time and place where primal responses seemed to be the way people handled life. The film, like its content, is light on subtlety--the violence when it comes erupts out of the commonplace, and thematically it veers from surprising depth to predictable gangster-film moves in a split second.

It's a lyrically and beautifully shot film--lots of 'standing behind the actor' shots, mixed with close-up facial moments, that draw the viewer in. I was uncomfortable, palpably so, a number of times, because it is that visceral.

Overall the film feels like a song--grand themes and throwaway lines capture the essence of a person, a moment, a circumstance, and leave the viewer to fill in the gaps, like a song so often does. On the subject of music--its fantastic--Cave and Ellis dig deep into old-school country and backwoods musical genres.

One other comment: two words--Tom Hardy!

penetrating foundations of modern philosophy

 

Trailer for War Kai Wong's martial arts tale of Ip Man, master to the legendary Bruce Lee. While we are looking eastward, this video was a big hit in my class last week, when one of the students introduced us to some Asian-pop music.

 

This is the blurb that accompanies the video:)

From 2 years of break, PSY is finally coming back with his 6th album 'PSY6甲'!
The album's weighty title song 'Gangnam Style' is composed solely by PSY himself from lyrics to choreography. The song is characterized by its strongly addictive beats and lyrics, and is thus certain to penetrate the foundations of modern philosophy.

Just what I was thinking, penetrating foundations of modern philosophy--watch out Pete Rollins I say!

yasiin bey and louis vuitton

 

Yasiin Bey, formerly known to most of us as Mos Def, has followed in the footsteps of one of his idols, Muhammad Ali, and publicly changed his name. Bey is muslim, either by conversion out of his mother's Christianity or by reversion to his father's religion, either way, he might be one of the more prominent muslim figures in pop music, either way--the man is still, still, a fashion plate and fine fine poet/artist/activist/actor. These are a couple of videos made for Louis Vuitton‘s “Core Values” campaign, and are offered as a homage to Ali.

 

samsara

SAMSARA Theatrical Trailer from Baraka & Samsara on Vimeo.

 If you liked Baraka, this might be for you. A new non-verbal documentary about us and the world about us. Samsara means many things but one of the meanings is connected to the idea of cyclical existence, the 'ever turning wheel of life. The film, according to its makers, "explores the wonders of our world from the mundane to the miraculous, looking into the unfathomable reaches of man’s spirituality and the human experience.  Neither a traditional documentary nor a travelogue, SAMSARA takes the form of a nonverbal, guided meditation.  Through powerful images, the film illuminates the links between humanity and the rest of nature, showing how our life cycle mirrors the rhythm of the planet."