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Photo Story 4
A Very Drunk Trip
Fiction
12 Red Shoes by Rhianon Williams 15 Seven/7 by David van Roon
18 The Exquisite Diamond by Michèle Schmitz 21 Cath by Ben Said Scott
Reflection
24 The Forgotten Revolution
of Jean-Luc Godard and Guy Debord
Cover photo by Osman Nuri Iyem / Edit by David van Roon
Poetry
32 Our Talented Poets
The Menteurs Editor In Chief - Alex Zhang Art Director - David van Roon Fiction Editors - Michèle Schmitz & David van Roon Essay Editor - Lindsay Schmitt Poetry Editor - Cais Jurgens Photographer - Osman Nuri Iyem
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In association with the University of Kent Follow The Menteur on Facebook For submissions and enquiries: editorinchief@thementeur.com
Dear Reader, We don’t believe sequels are always worse. But, to convince you, we had a tremendous task in front of us when we embarked on our second issue. Emin Turan, the cover artist for our first issue, raised the bar for us, yet we had the audacity to take on the challenge of making something of our own in our humble makeshift photography studio converted from the Parisian apartment of our editors. The result of the photo-shoot, done by our photographer Osman Nuri Iyem, is an elaboration on our title, The Menteur (French for “the liar”): our reflections about art congealed in one image. As we stated in our first issue, we believe art and literature is the lie through which we tell the truth. We stand by our words, and invite you to think with us about art, literature, and truth. Can art tell its truth scientifically? For the masters of the Renaissance, art and science both serve the perfection of beauty. Perspective, argued German literary critic Walter Benjamin, was the original sin of Western art. Art must have a higher purpose than imitating empirical reality. Even the celestial perfection of Leonardo’s geometry and Michelangelo’s anatomy is but a lie about the imperfection of our earthly habitat. The circumference of art cannot be defined by the coordinates of an external law. Art has to find its own way to tell its truth. But we believe the truth of art is more than the self-expression of the artist. Psychoanalysis has revealed that the ego is but a fiction. The inner-life of the artist cannot be granted authenticity by default. Russian poet Mayakovsky said he had to step on the throat of his own muse to stay true to the demand of revolutionary art. If our consumer society encourages the out-pouring of our inner dirt, then ruthless self-censorship can take on a radical meaning. It is in this spirit that we decided to censor our own cover image. We think the censored image is more provocative than the original. However, this provocation would be an empty gesture if we didn’t have anything to back it up. Collected in this issue are poems and short stories written by authors from all over the world. Also featured in this issue are two essays on political cinema in commemoration of the 45th anniversary of the uprisings of students and workers in May 1968. Moreover, two of our editors report from the city of Marseille: one with words, the other with images. Which one tells the truth? We will leave it up to the readers to decide. We wanted to take our readers on an adventure. We are convinced, while working on our second issue, that this adventure will take us even further into unexplored territories. We hope our collective effort will help you stay passionate, and stay curious!
The Menteurs
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A VERY DRUNK TRIP TO THE CITY OF MARSEILLE 4
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n beautiful Marseille you look out to sea for the sunset and to your back the moon rises above the mountains. In springtime, the palm trees sprout and you forget you’re in Western Europe for a time. By the beach kids are skateboarding, kick-flip, half-pipe blues in a graffiti covered skate park. The beer flows freely by the sand, the toilets are full of would be lovers making way too much noise and my shoes are full of sand. It was a nice break I must say, from the spring rain in Paris. Seeing the sun for the first time in months, I proceeded to get both the worst and best sunburn of my life. It was so good to see my skin turn red and peel for the first time in as long as I can remember. Ozzy was quite sure the water would be warm enough for a swim but quickly changed his mind upon dipping his toes into the freezing Mediterranean. However, if you’re looking for a south of France getaway this spring, there is the festival, THIS IS (NOT) MUSIC, on until the ninth of June. The opening night featured a private exhibition of skateboarding history, artifacts and artwork (now open to the public) followed by a slew of performers including Mos Def, The Undertones and Wu Tang Clan. This particular night in late April featured performer Cody Chestnut and his band, best known for touring with The Roots. The name of the venue is La Friche la Belle de Mai, located on 41, rue Jobin. Once an industrial plant for rolling tobacco, it was turned into a cultural center in the early 1990’s in order to benefit the public and has since displayed the works of thousands of artists and musicians from all over the world. Since its inception, it has been completely covered in street art and graffiti, which adds to its unique vibe. Local kids spend their time socializing and skating at its skate park, along with families who have come to view the exhibitions or to be entertained by quality, live music. We arrived at the festival with the highest of hopes, quickly dashed by the rain. That is until we met Thomas, the motorcycling Frenchman with a dashing beard and pockets full of rolling tobacco and beer, which he shared generously. Fortunately, he knew well the management of the exhibition and snuck us in the back door. Upon arrival, we were asked to quickly finish our beer and deposit the cups in the trash before viewing the exhibition. The inside was the largest collection of skateboards, counter culture history so far collected in southern France. It traces the origins of the sport back to the late 60’s and early 70’s until today. Three full floors of skateboarding history, photographs and paintings enticed us to the roof for cocktails and an incredible view of the city. The city itself is a beautiful place, whether you’re packed into the endless bars or just sipping drinks by the waterfront, the unending garden of masts rising out to sea. M
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rom the beach, f e h t . n o ompidou Sunset eorges P G e d a n e Prom The Menteur, SUMMER, 2013
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Marseille’s mirrored event pavilion on the recently renovated Old Port’s promenade. French-Armenians protesting the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink.
American musician Cody Chestnutt is playing at Cabaret AlĂŠatoire of the Friche Belle de Mai
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CathĂŠdrale ting in the Cais is res
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ront of eggar in f onverb s s le e ef c hom h nomad/ er our bri Turkish, A Turkis de la Major. Aft o ls a m a I his le CathĂŠdra finding out that m me and offers nd fro y e n o m sation, a es to get he refus us. o t pastry
FICTION WITH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM DAVID VAN ROON, BEN SAID SCOTT, MICHELE SCHMITZ & RHIANON WILLIAMS
Photographs by Osman Nuri Iyem
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by Rhianon Williams
S R E D I by Rhianon Williams
am a doll dressed in red and black, my favourite dress and shoes. Everything has been prepared, eliminating from the room all human error. I tell myself nothing could be easier than this day. I hear her words reverberate across the flagstones beneath my red shoes. I’d cleaned them especially for the occasion, if you can call a funeral an occasion. When I think of the word, I think of excitement or joy, not this feeling. This feeling I can’t describe. I am outlined in crimson, yet pictured in sepia. I am whole, but missing a portion. It’s a painful, guilty ache combined with relief all congregating in one small vein stretching and ripping in my chest. It’s purple. The feeling is purple. It’s blue and red on one canvas both fighting for recognition, but lost in a purple haze. Unidentifiable; impossible to separate and make clear which dip they belong in on the easel. I want to scratch the paint. Etch words with my fingernails, but I cannot. I remember her advice, so I sit, listen and remain calm. ‘Be a swan.’ Yes, a swan. Beautiful, calm and collected on the surface, yet paddling like hell underneath. I’m trying to stay afloat, but my feathers have been ruffled and the wind is in the wrong direction. I’m adrift letting the current take me into its arms. I don’t want anyone to touch me. I don’t like being touched. None of those mourners do either, but they are breaking the silent understanding between them by holding hands, embracing whilst remaining composed. Their colours, mixing through their palms, turn the purple into black. The more people connect, the darker it gets. It fills them with black until it outlines their eyes and dims their vision. Focus Rhianon.
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S E O H S Stay calm. ‘Stay on the ball.’ Yes, I’m on the ball, Nellie. We’re all on the ball. Tentatively balancing, and rolling towards hell, but still on the ball. Focus. My shoes smile at me and I smile back. I’d be the one in the box if she saw me in red shoes here, now. ‘Red shoes, no knickers!’ Exactly. Risqué, like walking down the street in only a mackintosh. I grin. Then stop. The purple rising again in my throat, choking me. Tastes of green. Sunshine and blue. Things live here, sucking people dry of any sort of feeling. I look at my brother; he looks uncomfortable in his suit. He was forced to wear it by our Mother. I look down, at his shoes, then at mine; we are connected. His are brown and ornate with words printed across the side in cream, words which I can’t quite make out. ‘Paul Smiths.’ ‘Thanks, I couldn’t see that far.’ We were always very particular about our clothing around her. Anything with words she would read, too many buttons and she would wonder why so many. We soon knew what not to wear and how to rebel. These things weren’t practical to her. She was a seamstress who could finish a textile project for school in 10 minutes before the final exam and not waste an inch of cloth. ‘It’ll be good when I get it home.’ Four sizes too big did by no means prevent her from buying something she liked. Hats never looked good on her, but she was determined to have them and fix them up. Sometimes I thought she was tired of fixing things. Or just tired. 50 years alone, and still alone. Separated
from the ones she loved and thrown in a box to burn like a piece of kindling, crackling in the dark. My fists start to shake and I drop whose hand I was holding and let mine fall to my side. They don’t notice. They’re in their own heads, walking and talking, but still in the past until the present suits them to be a part of it. I am in mine. It’s Wednesday, I’m tired, it’s cold and we are walking to her small flat in the middle of town. Five of her great-grand children trundling towards her warmth and always open door. The warmth is gone now and the door closed. Someone else lives there, a stranger, cold and unfriendly person frightening any lingering scent of hers that may still be attached to the wallpaper, the doors, the windows. She was the flat and the flat was her. Ornaments were super glued to other ornaments. Nothing was ever thrown out. Clocks that hadn’t worked since WW2 because of, ‘What was it?’ ‘They just need some elbow grease.’ That’s it, ‘elbow grease’. Always made me imagine how they collected the elbow grease, and who from? It must have been very expensive for the clocks not to be fixed for so long. If only something fictional could fix time, I’d gladly triple the best bid. How much did my shoes cost? I didn’t remember, only that they were expensive, but I had to have them because they had soft red, velvet lining to slip my white feet into and entomb them in luxurious comfort. This is not what she wanted. She was 101 and still too young. Why couldn’t people simply be replaced? Then we wouldn’t have this attachment to such things. They’d call our generation ‘The Insatiable Consumers’ or TIC
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for short. Tic... Tic... Tick... TICK... TICK TOCK. I try to silence the rhythm of my blood in my ears. The mad, audible bass line too low to be heard, only felt in every atom vibrating, every sliver of skin scraping against its neighbour; catching fire and enflaming the vulnerable flesh beneath. It’s Mother’s turn to speak. She looks tired, weary of the day. She is wearing her best suit and dusk-coloured overcoat, but it has buried her small frame. Her clock is ticking too, possibly saying soon she will be the eldest generation, the top of the family tree, and then what? Wait to fall into a casket of her family’s choosing, next to the row upon row of rotten apples enriching the moist soil with her last meal. She’s twisting and turning in her chair refusing to let the tears emanate from her eyes. How could she face her children if she fails? Our distant cousin finishes her sterile speech and ceremoniously bows her head, as if at the end of a play and she is the star. My Mother stands and I give her the smile I’ve saved till now to give her encouragement. She is not there to receive it though, and my efforts go remiss. She looks through me and moves slowly past the other guests, clinging to each chair and dragging her legs towards the vicar with determination to go on with the show. She begins. ‘I want to tell you a story-’ ‘- queer long coat from heel to head Was half of yellow and half of red-’ ‘Shush Nellie, I’m trying to listen!’ She shouldn’t have worn that overcoat. People were starting to whisper and shift in their seats. I could see them looking around and staring at each other, thinking is that her Mother with the orange coat? Yes it is my mother and I am proud of her. ‘Takes all sorts to make a world.’ ‘You’re quite right Nell, all sorts, even orange-coat wearers. It would be
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boring without them.’ I start to laugh uncontrollably at the witty outbursts. Shaking with laughter until my ribs hurt, but no-one else is laughing. I frown at them for their prudishness. Nellie always liked to laugh, why not now? Why not today? I felt almost back to normal, nothing seems to have changed. Slowly being filled with optimism for the future. What was missing before now felt back in place. ‘I’ll get you a cuppa.’ ‘Oh, yes please, I’d love one. It’s always the ‘occasion’ for a cup o’ tea.’ ‘I’ll pop’ kettle on.’ Mum finished her speech chocked and white, unable to say the last few words. Shove that in your sterile pipe, Esther! Tea had come at last, but it was time to say goodbye to the doll in the box. The first row did a fly-by, some cried when they looked inside the casket and were promptly whisked away by their loved ones to contain a possible outbreak of emotion. God forbid they make a scene in public! My mind wondered and I wished I was in an Arab country where people can howl and wail at all of creation to place the blame somewhere for the death of this one individual, not bottle the pain and let it fester and ferment into anguish, pitying themselves for years to come. These people plan pain. They wear their blacks and purples today, but tomorrow it will be spring. It is my turn next. My brother is leaning over her to place something in the coffin; his body concealing the woman in the casket from my view. Quickly he raises his hand to his face to stop the tears falling onto the body, then turns to escape. I move forward with ceremonial grace still watching him scurry away to the nearest exit for a fag. Slowly and deliberately I bend down to kiss the forehead as she would have done. ‘It’s not her...but she was here. I heard her!’ I start and move backwards, trying to escape the scream of reality coming from my eyes. ‘No, no, no, no-’ ‘I’m sorry’, said Nellie. Silence. The clocks stop. The doll is cut from its strings. The doll in red shoes.
by
Dav id v an Roo n
7 Y
ou are beautiful. I will make sure to remember this.’ Alfred slips out from under the covers and sweeps his moccasins from under the bed. Speckles of light fall onto the sheets through half shut curtains. He spreads his arms, turns his head left, then right. His trousers and shirt are a tangled ball at the foot of the oak frame. The bedside radio crackles with the voice of some hotshot Cambridge mathematician. When you reach infinity, a number which quite plausibly – a ten to one chance, I dare state – ends on a seven, you return to zero. Alfred nods as he steps into his trousers’ legs. He slowly buttons up his shirt, from the top down. Nearly seven minutes later he stands outside, straight backed under trees of autumn red. As he lights a cigarette he looks up at the hotel room window. In there, fenced by empty pale walls, the finite shape of a naked woman adorns wrinkled sheets. Alfred drags on his cigarette and releases the smoke in thick clouds; they wash over his face like the sea at high tide. An entanglement of voices and music rises up from terraces and cafés which line the boulevard. She truly was beautiful, Alfred says to himself as he flicks off his cigarette. It spins through air, where cinders trace its gentle arc, and falls on the road, instantly flattened by the rush of traffic. Alfred gives the hotel one last look, then moves off, his hands slumped in his pockets. As he whistles a frill melody, he removes a small paper, no bigger than a metro ticket, from his coat. He stops in front of the bakery on the street corner and examines the tiny words written on the paper with care; going over each one of them, one by one, as to not forget
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that words are more than just ideas. He folds the paper four times and slides it in his breast pocket. His face relaxes, the corners of his mouth slump downwards and the skin around his eyes softens. He sighs and looks left, then right. He steps out onto the road and instantly gets hit by a red Ford. Alfred slides over the hood, his body breaks on the windshield, and as he is launched up, in one last leap through air, his eyes scan the sky for the sun. They fade to white when he hits the asphalt with a dull crack. There is no doubt about it, the blow has killed him. Two curious passersby stop and lean over Alfred as the Ford drives off. ‘Gooey goodness. That must be about seventeen cups.’ ‘We should inform someone.’ ‘Dear friend, that procedure would take at least a week.’ ‘You’re right. A lot of forms. But look, no need for that, this fellow is breathing!’ ‘No, no, his skull is obviously fractured.’ ‘I trust your expert opinion. Can I call it then? Have you got a watch?’ ‘Have you got a permit?’ ‘No, but I have contacts. I could probably obtain one today. Or otherwise tomorrow.’ ‘If you call it now, it will not be valid. It’d be a very wasteful operation.’ ‘My good man, you are making quite a case there. I will definitely have to take your point in consideration.’ ‘Perhaps over coffee?’ ‘Perhaps. Over a cigar, too?’ ‘Why not. We have, indeed, a hard day’s work behind us.’ As the two walk off and enter the bakery on the corner, sirens’ blares start to echo through the street. A red ambulance pulls up beside Alfred. The door opens with a bang and a man and a woman, both shrouded in long white coats, step out. ‘Good God, what a mess,’ the woman says. ‘You can say that. Who is going to clean all of that?’ the man asks as he points at pieces of Alfred’s brain that are smudged out on the asphalt in spaghetti-like strands. ‘Not me!’ ‘Me neither.’ ‘We should feel his pulse.’ ‘It is our job.’ ‘Who will do it?’ the woman asks. ‘Not me!’ ‘Me neither.’ ‘Flip a coin?’ ‘I don’t have a coin.’ ‘Perhaps...’ the man points at Alfred’s body. ‘Ah, let me see.’ The woman leans over Alfred, and pulls a large coin from his coat’s pocket. She flips it. The two follow the coin as it slides through the air smoothly and then lands
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in a small puddle. The woman picks it up and examines it closely. ‘I call heads,’ she says. ‘That’s what I thought you would say,’ the man says grinning. He rubs his hands together, ‘Tails for me then! Tails for me! Tell me, what is it?’ ‘Heads!’ ‘Blimey!’ the man frowns. He walks forward, taking care not to step onto Alfred’s arm, which is dislocated next to his leg, which is in its turn, dislocated next to his head. He kneels next to Alfred’s ear and brings his mouth close. ‘Sir, I am going to feel your pulse now. If you have any objections, this would be the time to make them known.’ Silence. The man looks back at the woman and shrugs his shoulders. He pushes his stethoscope against Alfred’s wrist. ‘As I thought. Sir, you are not alive,’ he says. He turns to the woman, ‘Susan, would you be a doll, and make up this good sir’s bill?’ The woman hands the man a slip of paper, which he then sticks to Alfred’s chest. Both get back in the ambulance and drive off. As the car turns the corner with squeaking breaks, the two curious passersby are just leaving the bakery. The tallest of the two gently wipes some croissant crumbs from the other’s lips. ‘Oh my, look over there!’ The two men run over to Alfred’s body, which has now started to give off a strong odor. They lean over the body and pinch their noses tight. ‘Goodness! Did you take off your shoes again?’ ‘Well, no. Look, there they are,’ the man lowers his head and points at his loafers. ‘It is quite peculiar, indeed.’ ‘I put some powder on them this morning, it should have soaked up all the moist.’ ‘No, no, this man. It is quite peculiar.’ ‘I do trust your expert opinion. Should we call someone then?’ ‘Have you got a phone?’ ‘No, but I just found this coin on the ground. I could take it to the pay phone.’ ‘It is located at the other end of the street. It’d take you a long time.’ ‘My good man, that is one valid point you are making. I will take it in consideration.’ ‘Perhaps over a glass of cognac?’ ‘Perhaps. Over a slice of pie, too?’ ‘Why not. We have, indeed, a hard day’s work behind us.’ As the two men walk off and enter a small basement café next to the bakery the sound of sirens grows louder. The red ambulance drives up fast and stops beside Alfred. The door opens with a bang and the man and woman, without their coats on now, step out.
‘Good God, what a stench! I told you no-one would clean this mess,’ the woman says. ‘The more important question would be: Did our good sir manage to pay his bill?’ the man asks. ‘Will you take a close look?’ ‘Not me!’ ‘Me neither.’ ‘The boss would not appreciate us treating people for free! We gotta get our well deserved payment.’ ‘It is our job.’ ‘Who will do it?’ the woman asks. ‘Not me!’ ‘Me neither.’ ‘Flip a coin?’ ‘I do not have a coin.’ ‘He does...’ the man points at Alfred’s body. ‘Ah, let me see.’ The woman leans over Alfred, and fumbles around in all of his coat’s pockets. She turns to the man. ‘No coins to be found here,’ she says. ‘That’s what I thought you would say,’ the man says, his eyebrows raised. He rubs his hands together, roughly, so that they make a squeaky noise. ‘You are standing there already, aren’t you? Tell me, did he pay the bill?’ The woman leans closely over Alfred’s body. ‘No!’ ‘Dammit!’ the man grinds his teeth. He disappears into the ambulance and returns with a little black briefcase. He steps over Alfred’s left foot – the right one has gone missing. He kneels next to the body and carefully places the briefcase on the asphalt. He clicks open the lock and reveals a metallic device. He leans over, his mouth right next to Alfred’s ear. ‘Sir, I am going to give you a little shock. If you have any objections... oh well, I would shock you anyway.’ The man looks back at the woman and motions her to come forward. As she kneels next to him, he pushes the briefcase towards her. ‘Susie, doll, you may turn the switch.’ He pushes two round metal pieces, connected to the metallic box with thick, white cables, onto Alfred’s temple and squeezes tight. ‘I am going to count down from ten, Susie. When I reach zero you turn that knob. Yes, the big one.’ The woman leans over the machine, her eyes fixed on the button, her fingers trembling, ticking against the metal. ‘Ten, nine, eight, seven...’ ‘You are beautiful. I will make sure to remember this.’
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famous melting clocks in Dalí’s paintings, my whole joyful face just seems to melt away into the ground. I can tell my eyes have become a bit smaller, as they always do when some strange thoughts visit my mind. What the hell is he talking about?! Does he want to get some attention, does he want me to admire him because of his stupid, narrow-minded friends who bought him some stupid body lotion for his birthday? I cannot believe this, and I have to concentrate to avoid narrowing my mouth which would reveal my uneasiness. At this moment, I’d rather stand over there, three metres away, next to Stephanie and Janine, still dreaming about this handsome guy who seemed to have been playing the songs only for me, looking at me with his beautiful green eyes all the way down from the stage. I cannot believe I am really next to John and he is telling me all this. Does he even take a breath? Minutes pass by, and he is still palming off some odd stories about his colleagues and his sports club on me. He is so busy to not forget one single detail that he throws a bunch of words in all directions, like the disco lights in the room which appear in every colour you can imagine and bounce from one point to the next, up and down, touch the ceiling, touch the ground. They are floating in every corner one can imagine! It really bewilders me. My arms are crossed and I am no longer admiring his suit. After some time I only half listen to him. It took three seconds to destroy all my hopes, all my dreams. He started talking, and just didn’t say what I wanted to hear. No comments about my gorgeous new Dolce & Gabbana dress, about my make up, no question about me or my family. Just him. Just his friends. This flashing of the lights is a little bit too much for me. I turn my head and notice a girl who is leaning on the bar. Some people form a circle around her, so I guess
TI E
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aturday night, party time! Upper East Side, three friends, one dress, one aim: have a good night. This weekend, there will be a huge event in Chio, a very famous and special club on 3rd Avenue. By good fortune the girls got one of the last tickets to attend this big party. Three freshly polished diamonds are glittering through the darkness, starting to fade only a little when they enter Chio. She wants to be noticed, she is looking at the stage and the only thing that crosses her mind is: wow, this is my rock star. This girl is me. This is my guitar player. I want to be with him, I cannot be without him. Then again, this other thought, fighting the first one: there he is standing, John, with his perfectly styled hair and his elegant suit. His clean, white shirt looks so tight on him, I am afraid it might burst open any second. You know, he is the type of guy that buys his shirts a size smaller just to emphasize his broad shoulders and his muscular body. Black tie, a classic, combined with a Hugo B-O-S-S belt which catches everyone’s eye. You really cannot miss this belt, the metallic letters reflecting the disco lights it almost hurts your eyes. I’m lurking around and peek at him in order to melt into this positive energy and this lightness that radiates from him. Enchanted by this being, I finally decide to go over and talk to him. So exciting! My friends already laugh at me because my cheeks are a bit rose and one notices the unconscious smile on my lips, round up with dimples in the corner of my mouth. Two minutes later, and I’m standing next to John. As usual, he gives me a kiss to say hello and immediately starts talking. The band, wow great! Then, he boasts about the big party his cool friends had organized for his 22nd birthday. All of a sudden, I can feel the muscles in my face relax and just like these
D N O M IDA
they might be her friends. She looks sad somehow. Her black silky shiny hair hides a part of her small face. She’s wearing a skirt combined with a strapless top, but no high heels. No heels? Maybe that’s why I noticed her in the first place! Anyway, she looks a bit lost, and I cannot stop observing her. She isn’t talking, just drinking her beer and looking down at her feet. I cannot detect any ring or bracelet, the only thing that stands out are her rough hands and her unpolished finger nails. After a while she looks around the room, realizing that I was staring at her, and with a kind of shock I just look away. Oh no, she noticed it! How stupid of me. I try to catch John’s eyes and to listen to him again. No. It’s not possible anymore. This girl at the bar, who I have never seen before in my life and who I don’t know, made me aware of something. Something…strange… something…interesting, but at the same time crazy and unsatisfying. It definitely disturbs me. I wanted to be loved by him, admired, noticed. But was I really in love? Is it the same as being noticed, having someone who keeps noticing you? The one and only, does it exist? I am not sure anymore. Just confused. Guitar player. John. The difference? Three years of passion, and 2 months of “being in love”. Oh John… Then I step back to my friends. We have a talk, then I observe the other people around me. On my left, one group of boys and girls is moving to the rhythm of the music and they seem to enjoy themselves. A little bit behind them two men dressed in grey suits have a discussion. The one with the short brown hair gesticulates a lot and one gets the impression that they are shouting at each other. Are they having a fight? In the corner I see a couple and they are hugging each other. In love… who knows? The lights fade, the music stops. The band thanks the audience for having been there, for having “such a
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wonderful night! You are so great! We love you!” Well, what the fuck. I am so pissed off at all these people around me. The drunken group of men next to me are just annoying, and now I even blame those who just seem to have a good night out, not looking drunk. I am angry, mixed with a great portion of disappointment. All because of what this mysterious girl revealed to me and my senses. I peer once again, but she’s not there anymore. Meanwhile the guitar player quits his instrument to come in front of the stage and to be presented by the band leader. Oh yes, he thinks he is so great. I turn my back on him; I don’t want to be noticed anymore. Not by him. I am just fed up. Am just fed up… just fed up…Fed Up. I have to stop thinking like someone who’s insane, because Janine already puts her hand on my left arm and asks me: “Are you alright, honey? You look so serious.” One minute later. Stephanie. “Is it because of Luke? Come on, don’t tell me that”. Well, perhaps she is right. I cannot stop thinking about his great performance. But there was John, and this girl at the bar, and I am just confused. Forget about Luke, he isn’t interesting anymore. How could I be so naïve? I try to find an answer to calm Steph. “No, I’m okay, I was just wondering if he saw me.” What a stupid answer! She’s one of my best friends, and I just reply “I was just wondering if he saw me”. Why am I saying that? Of course he didn’t see me, but that was not the problem anymore. The problem was John, who talked nonsense, looked around instead of at me, this girl, standing there alone and actually being alone in the crowd of people, being one of thousand people who joined the party but who wasn’t noticed. Just like me. Exactly, I got it, that was the reason why I turned my back on him, why I refused to be seen by this macho, why I just wanted to go home. How stupid one could feel in a Dolce & Gabbana dress.
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My friends don’t ask any further, they are a little tipsy anyway so they don’t bother about my “drama”. Well, I know Janine, she still has some wrinkles on her forehead which reveal that she doesn’t accept my strange behaviour, but maybe she just didn’t dare to ask any further questions. Some boys seem to begin a fight. It’s far away, but you can feel there is something going on. We look at each other: ok, time to go home. Janine gives me her umbrella, and after some walking we call a cab. During the whole drive, I gaze outside the window and watch the buildings as well as the people passing by, still dreaming about everything that happened in the club. Everybody is tired, it’s very quiet in the taxi. My eyes follow the raindrops which slowly glide down the window, split up or join another drop because of changing direction. We get off the car and stroll some time side by side, not talking. After a while we say goodbye to each other, and I walk the last block by myself. It’s still raining a little bit. 4 am. Fresh because of the rain, confused because of the girl. Everybody wants to get attention, to be noticed and to be loved. This obsession directs our behaviour. Why in the world did I see this girl at the bar, with her long, black hair? I, the one who bought this beautiful new dress, why didn’t John pay any attention to it? I arrive in front of my house. I tiptoe straight behind the house, there are still some chairs which my mum put in the garden because of the good weather this afternoon. I sit on one, the umbrella still opened. A space of one’s own, just me under my umbrella, just this small space between the chair and the umbrella, here in my garden, my own. Like this, I am not noticed. I am hidden. Just as the girl was hidden, and she probably wasn’t even
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aware of it. Why do people do that, dress up in Dolce & Gabbana dresses and high heels and just think that this great guy has to be obsessed with them? No. I am so disappointed at this weather, at this night, at this party. But most of all, I am disappointed in myself. I am still the girl who looks at the guitar player and who wishes to be noticed. I close my eyes. I see the guitar player in front of me. How handsome he looked. This stylish t-shirt, this “Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll” attitude, these fingers which are in harmony with the guitar. But then this cruel character, this superficial attitude towards girls, no gentleman-like manners and even less respect. I was repressing it for a long time. God, what is it all about? Someone has to give me a lesson. But I think tonight, I got a glimpse of an answer to that question. It’s all about being noticed. Thank you, you unknown “bar girl”. You are my bar girl. Yes, you rescued me, you awoke me from my unrealistic dreams and you showed me that the world is not what I thought it was. It’s different than I always imagined. People do that, people go out. They have some drinks, enjoy the music, enjoy themselves. Dress up. And one main reason for that is to be noticed. HERE I AM, look at me, SEE me! See ME! The next time, I have to exaggerate the smile on my face, I guess I have to drink some more cosmos to be in a good mood, to exude this energy which attracts all men and makes them crazy. Is it that, what I have to do? Steph, Janine, can you tell me? Oh my God, I am really talking to myself, they don’t even hear me, they ignore the screams in my head which almost make my head explode. They are at home, I am alone in my garden, under my umbrella. This girl, so skinny and so inconspicuous, couldn’t hide anymore what I was apparently trying to hide all the time. People like me want to be noticed. No, I have to correct, they have to be noticed. A human need. Seen from this point of view, the night wasn’t even that bad. I look at my watch. 5 am. I am freezing a little bit, my legs are very cold and I have got goose bumps. Time to call it a night. I close the umbrella, I stand up.
Illustrations by Helen Duncan
Story by Ben Said Scott
CATH AN ABSTRACT
V
iolets, Parma Violets, in big pink letters. Parma’s a place in Italy so that must be where they make them. They’re so crunchy so I better not crunch them, we must be quiet, yep, everyone else is. I’ll just sit them on my tongue until they are gone. They’re Mum’s favourites too, but when I look up to her I see her eyes filled with tears and a smile like an elephant’s tusk. So it’s silence from me. What did Mum say? Eyes to the front and don’t fidget, crying might be fidgeting though, but I won’t tell her that. So I look at the front, and it is so pretty and I put some more violets in my hand, Father would be proud how I eat them so silently. When this happens to me, I will allow all the sweet eating in the world. All the people will look so happy, all the people, the chalk drapes. I look down, half a pack left...
T
he procession marches up the aisle. To the left a girl, round and fat, eats some sweets and kicks her legs into the back of the seat. The cameras flash from both sides. I change my expression, half a smile half a frown, what my wife tells me looks good. She dresses me you know, she makes all the decisions, no spending without consulting her. Friends call it ‘whipped’ and joke from behind their desks. But it is that way, and I don’t have time for such nonsense, I like it that way. At the front there are more cameras. I let go. My wife even had this all planned. What a woman, to think what could have been. Step aside and adjust the tie, all proper. Well it had to happen… but she’s so young… but it had to happen. This was the right choice. My wife in the front row cries, everyone cries, next to her our mother and brother.
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F
lash… Flash… Eyes sting from lights, they flash and the fist clenches. Palm’s sweaty, but can feel the birthing lines and one circle - cold and clean and new. Sweat pools, but these are tears that are happy. No more mistakes. The chalk drapes fall like scree and it is moments like this. Open hands press, her back, strong. Choices lead to an ending. Two boys now men, two girls now women. Two is now we. Strong, flash, behind. New father adjusting old neck-tie. Open mouths mouth the words.
I
f I want what I wanted, and heaven forbid I should dare think that, I could have had him. I know it and she knows it. I’m going to say something, when Father says I can say something. Or is that a cliché? Fuck it, everything’s a cliché.
T
he truth of the matter, if I can put it that way, is that this ceremony is all bluster. That is to say, if I may be so bold, that people no longer take this institution as sacred. For example, I myself as a man of the cloth have, on occasion, committed several infidelities, one with a rather buxom brunette who squealed rather tremendously, not that anyone should know or care. I would hardly fulfil my duties were I to parade this knowledge up and down Coventry, so to speak, so I choose not to. That isn’t to say she doesn’t serve a delicious moment in my memory which I readily call to mind when in a situation that is such a bore. But of course this is exactly what I am getting at. Love of the Lord pervades over all of us. Love of bodily flesh does in its own way too and marriage, for I will say that word, is no more than a cock’s bellowing ceremony to arise the morning sun. The whispers that roll up and down my pews on such occasions do little to quell the pomp of the ceremony, but they still might and probably are true. However why that should stop the man gently brushing the small of his betrothed’s back despite being caught in his jollyRodger get up, manning someone else’s deck, if I may be so crass, is beyond me. Love, ladies and gentlemen, is too far tarnished by marriage, under the eyes of the Lord we are all married and nary a piece of circular metal can change that.
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S
ing, on the dawn breeze, sing to me soft, and I will remember you forever. You are the angel of life so divine. My love and yet not mine. Time has you lost to me. But your presence ever felt beside an open window or a cockerel calling in the bourgeoning light of morning or the animal kingdom’s stampede however you would like it, it will be felt. From where you stand to me, hidden beneath the arched doorway, sing to me. Yes sing simply, above all the people, above the clouds that tear their faces, with your back to me sing. Sing and I will remember as I leave like a whisper no guest can hear.
O
ne foot simply in front of the other. One, one, one. Take this in moments, take them as if your heart will stop beating and the butterflies will all die. When father said speak now then I told. But he says no and I love him. One foot and then another. He has done me wrong, but I him too - so one foot for forgiveness. When father says speak now he does not mean say what you will or want, he means say what he will or want. He is so proud. He loves mother and they were the same. The match is no bad thing. It is not love, but what is love when it is love that breaks so many things? Can I really believe that? Father says speak now so I agree and he will pay for everything and mother has chosen the colours and the dress. I will not disagree with him again, I will not kick my legs into the chair in front of me, I will walk quietly. The butterflies still flap, I imagine them being blue like a dawn breeze but then stop. One, one. No crunching, eyes to the front and don’t fidget. But the flashes are so hot behind me and his hand is not right on the small of my back. Father says this will be the way of it but this way isn’t my voice. It isn’t my song. The words come out and I look around. That girl he was with in the crowd, but eyes to the front. Father says he is an idiot but that he will learn. She must be there for appearance, just ignore it and walk. The butterflies rise again until they are hammering my throat. Concentrate. One. Eyes to the front, but then the Father says speak now… so I whisper “I’m just about done,” and look into his eyes in time to see a smile.
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THE FORGOTTEN REVOLUTION Two essays on the radical cinemas of Jean-Luc Godard and Guy Debord by David van Roon & Alex Zhang
F
Photographs by Mondo
orty-five years ago, cinema was at the epicenter of political radicalism. In 1968, when the French Culture Minister, André Malraux, attempted to remove the founder of the Cinémathèque Française, Henri Langlois, radical students and artists rallied around him to stand against bureaucratic assault. The Cannes Film Festival, in May of the same year, was cancelled after Jean-Luc Godard announced his withdrawal in solidarity with the protesting students and workers. Two filmmakers - Jean-Luc Godard and Guy Debord - tried to capture the spirit of revolution in their aesthetically and politically radical films. However, despite their innovations, it is lamentable that both “counter-cinemas” failed to become popular, let alone a sustained alternative to mainstream commercial cinema desired by their authors. Godard’s collaborative output with Jean-Pierre Gorin was seldom shown outside militant circles and universities; Debord’s films, on the other hand, were only seen by a select few during his lifetime and were withdrawn from circulation altogether after the assassination of his publisher Gérard Lebovici. Our editors, David van Roon and Alex Zhang, re-examine the political cinemas of Jean-Luc Godard and Guy Debord and explain why they failed to square radicalism with popularity.
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Waiting for Godard A director’s search for zero in two acts
Essay
by D av
id v an R oo
1
n
ACT 1
E
stragon’s despair in Waiting for Godot, when he exclaims that ‘nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes’, is a feeling that may not be unfamiliar to those watching Jean-Luc Godard’s political films. This feeling of despair, of not gaining any sense of completion or entertainment by what is shown, is a effect the French director desires to distanciate the viewer from what is shown on the screen. In fact, Godard’s aesthetics was inspired by a modernist playwright – not Samuel Beckett, but Bertolt Brecht. It is from Brecht that Godard took the device of distanciation, a way to reveal to the audience that what it is seeing is not reality. It is not even a reflection of reality; it is – to put it in Godard’s words – ‘the reality of the reflection’. As soon as Godard started shooting political films it seemed clear to him that the language that was given, was exactly that what barricaded his way. The language, writing, recordings, images and signs he had to deal with were all part of the capitalist ideology he so forcefully rejected. Godard’s political cinema, therefore, can be conceptualized as the search for a semiotic counter-strategy to what French philosopher Louis Althusser called the Ideological State Apparatuses, through which individuals are ‘interpellated’ as political subjects and are implicated in their own domination. As a counter-strategy against cinema in its present form as a bourgeois, reactionary and fascist medium terms that Godard, according to a couple of Rollings Stone’s reporters at the time, used interchangeably Godard strived for the idea that literary critic Roland Barthes put forward in his 1953 book Writing Degree
Zero. Barthes pleas for a so-called zero language that can convey any message in an entirely objective way. He describes this zero degree as a neutral form of writing, one that is not bound by judgments and ideas as are imposed by ideology. This writing should exist in the absence of both. As Barthes remarks: ‘this absence is complete, it implies no refuge, no secrets; one cannot therefore say that it is an impassive mode of writing; rather, that it is innocent’. Barthes himself, who took great interest in cinema, would not have rejected the idea of using his literary theory on the medium of film. Godard even asked Barthes to appear in his science fiction film Alphaville, but Barthes, being a shy and introvert man, declined. Nevertheless, Barthes’ dream ‘to create a colourless writing, freed from all bondage to a preordained state of language’ is a utopian one. Godard wanted to break free from all rules, driven by the politically tense climate of the late 60‘s – the ongoing Vietnam war, and the uprisings of May 1968. It was in 1967, with the openly political film Deux ou trois choises que je sais d’elle, that Godard’s search for Cinema Degree Zero truly started. This search was further initiated in the following years. It is in Deux ou trois choises (1967), La Chinoise (1967), Week-end (1967) and Le Gai savoir (1968) that the director addresses the problems put up in Writing Degree Zero and attempts to deal with them. It was the shooting of La Chinoise that brought Godard in touch with Maoist militants from the French Union of Young Communists. At the beginning of La Chinoise the tactics to fight the bourgeoisie are specified: ‘Use their own weapons
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against them’. The weapon Godard is talking about is the Ideological State Apparatus and its language. In one scene Wiazemsky is hiding behind a barricade that is entirely constructed of Mao’s little red books. She is holding a radio that she then turns into a gun with which she shoots directly at the camera. This particular example reveals, firstly, how language is a weapon, and how seemingly passive words on the radio can have a much larger impact than anticipated, for a gun can achieve real damage; secondly, it shows the unavoidable two-sidedness of language. At the end of La Chinoise, actor Léaud walks up to a building that is falling apart. A man is painting the words Theatre Year Zero on the wall. What Godard, arguably, means, is that to create zero, we have to break down all that exists. The next shot, inside of the building, shows two women standing opposite each other in glass boxes. They are banging on the glass, because they have no other language, they have unlearned everything, and need to learn to speak again. But for now, without a language, they are isolated in their glass containers. These two examples show Godard’s struggle in finding a suitable language - how he is laying bare the difficulties of finding a neutral language. In his next film, Week-end, Godard must have picked up on something more clear, for he now seemed ready to declare the end of cinema.
Adieu, Cinema!
Week-end states a break with cinema – at the end of the film the text ‘fin de cinéma’ appears – but is nevertheless, a continuation of Godard’s previous films. The director uses the same techniques to make his points. When Emily Brontë walks onto the screen, it is showing again the fabrication of fiction, and hence, how Emily is nothing but a mere sign for fiction. When one of the main characters, played out by Jean Yanne, is asked by a passerby ‘Are you in a film or reality?’, he answer ‘In a film’. Week-end shows a derailed consumerist society. The film is a chain of bloody car accidents – typified in an 8 minute tracking shot of a traffic jam, accompanied by a deafening concerto of horns, caused by yet another crash. Kawin writes that this scene had even him ‘playing with the chewing gum on the theater seat’. Immediately after he states that the scene is, nevertheless, one of Godard’s most exciting. Why he finds that, he fails to mention. Notwithstanding the radical use of Brechtian techniques, Week-end was a hit. It ended up being one of Godard’s films with the largest commercial success. The films was meant to be antibourgeois – or even state the end of the bourgeoisie – but was instead adored by upper-class intellectuals. The film ends in a cannibal feast at which a wife eats her husband. This scene could be read as the extremity of our capitalist/consumerist
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society. Nonetheless, Week-end, with the episode with Emily Brontë, and a reference to La Chinoise with an appearance of Léaud in the same Napoleonic outfit he wore in that feature, is more of a parody, than a new beginning. Godard’s search for zero was far from finished with Week-end, above all, it led him, through the passage way that was Le Gai savoir, into his next politcal stage; his Dziga Vertov collaborate period.
ACT 2
B
ut for a single tree the stage in Waiting for Godot is empty. In the first act this tree is bare and seemingly dead, but when the curtain goes up for the second act the audience notices a change; the tree has ‘four or five’ leaves now. Just like the tree in Waiting for Godot, Godard’s cinema after Week-end has evolved. The leaves on the tree give the audience hope for change, perhaps a relief of nothing happening, but this is a false hope, because the second act leaves the viewer as hopeless as the first. It is the same for Godard’s cinema. There is a change after Week-end – it is the start of Godard’s Dziga Vertov period – but, as pointed out at the end of the first act, it was just as well a continuation of his previous practices. Daney, in a theory he calls the Godard Paradox, states that Godard constantly tries to manipulate the present, but ‘is too Bazinian to commit himself to the loss of “reality”, which is replaced by a generalized interplay of references from one image to another, or to an acceptance that the image can no longer be used as a human means of communication, even negatively.’ Daney goes as far as to say that Godard thrives on the rules of cinema. Or in other words, of what is already constituted – which is in conclusion, what makes Godard plus ten. Hence Daney concludes that ‘there is nothing revolutionary about Godard, rather, he is more interested in radical reformism, because reformism concerns the present.’ It is in Le Gai savoir that Godard lays out the difficulties of what he proposed first in Deux ou trois choises, in the most clear way. Le Gai savoir therefore, might just be Godard’s most interesting film in his search for zero.
Le Gai savoir, originally made for television, is a film in three parts. Concurrently, it proposes a three-year course in which one learns to unread, unwrite and unsee. The political message of Le Gai savoir calls for a rethinking of all education in society. From a young age children are taken and encircled through education by the Ideological State Apparatus. Kavanagh adds ‘All schooling is brainwashing, an acculturation to the prejudices and tastes of a particular society. When this cultural brainwashing is so intimately tied up with the primary elements of our language, how can a revolutionary art pretend to adopt this language as a supposedly innocent vehicle for the use of which it claims to pay no price?’. As Godard’s films show – it cannot. The first two parts of the film show how the two main characters, played out by Juliet Berto and Léaud, meet every night to analyze images and sound from within a dark TV studio. The darkness of the studio can be seen as zero surrounding them, or more so the only passageway to zero in a total lack of capitalist signs. Although the studio is dark, the two main characters are always lit up by bright lamps. A way of saying that they themselves are not zero. But it is the third part that juxtaposes everything. The third year, in which the two protagonists should have been converted to zero, starts with Berto standing against a fully lit wall with three comic book characters on it. She is reading a poem from a book, but the language is not one we know. It is a zero language. This scene can be read in two different ways. Firstly, in the way that Berto truly achieved zero. Putting her next to the superheroes then makes her a super human, one that is not influenced by language. Secondly, the whole scene gives to think immediately, how the spectator cannot see zero; it is inconceivable because he himself is too far removed. Then the comic book characters in their turn are signs, closely linked to capitalist culture. Immediately, the screen flashes back to the dark studio and it becomes clear. There is no zero, not even in year three. The scene in the light is no more than a parody of zero. The film ends with Godard whispering that Le Gai savoir is not the film that should have been made; hence, it is a failure. He goes on to say that ‘it is not about starting from zero, but it is about finding your way
back to zero’. And it is in this that one finds the key to Godard’s search - that, as pointed out before, has been misread by many. The effects of Godard’s films are not so much that they ever achieve zero; of more importance is how they reveal the difficulties that come with the making of political cinema and showing the spectator a true image and a true sound. The achievement of Godard is the recognition that ideology is more than the message or content of a film; the very form of a film can either promote or deter ideological identification. A viable counter-cinema, therefore, needs to go beyond ‘delivering a political message’ in its content, but needs to interrogate the link between spectatorship and forms of filmic signification. In other words, a counter-cinema is as much a question of the representation of politics as the politics of representation. However, the pitfall of this theory is the conception that the spectatorship is solely conditioned by the strategies of filmic signification, or the internal logic of the form. Different to Brecht, for whom the work would be incomplete without the active participation of the spectator, for political modernists such as Godard, spectatorship is already inscribed in the text. It was ‘Brecht the formalist’, rather than ‘Brecht the realist’, who became the central reference point for Godard. For Brecht, realism meant ‘discovering the causal complexes of society and taking the standpoint of the revolutionary proletariat.’ It is not merely a question of form. Reflexivity is attributed with an almost a priori political valence. Unlike Brecht, who was never against pleasure, identification, or entertainment, Godard’s countercinema had an almost ‘puritanical’ attitude towards filmic pleasure. Whereas Brecht’s theatre aimed for a kind of didacticism that is ‘intelligible to the broad masses’ and assumes ‘their standpoint, confirming and correcting it’, Godard’s political films are very challenging for the audience and require a certain ‘libidinal transfer’ whereby traditional satisfactions are replaced by the pleasure of intellectual mastery, by a ‘sadism of knowledge’ in the words of film scholar Robert Stam. Godard’s politcal films are not meant to be entertaining, and with a tidal wave of images and sounds - sometimes mere noise - that the viewer might not instantly recognize, he perhaps assumed the audience would readily accept this new way of watching films. In the end it is the working class that is left waiting for a revolution that Godard was supposed to set off, academics in their turn are waiting for Godard to achieve the zero state. And Godard himself? Godard is probably waiting for his current wife, Anne-Marie Miéville, to come home from the grocery store with his cigarettes. M
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The Vanguard Lost From Sight
Essay by A lex
Zha
2
ng
A productive controversy between Jean-Luc Godard and Guy Debord
G
uy Debord was a Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, and a founding member of the radical avant-garde group the Situationist International. After the release of Godard’s Le Gai savoir in 1969, the Situationist International published an article in its journal accusing Godard of plagiarism of the détournement technique practised by Situationists without “the slightest understanding”, and dismissed Godard’s cinema as “pretentious pseudo-innovations”. Being a lifelong prankster, Debord might have been too acerbic in his criticism of Godard. But there is something more important at stake than a brawl between two provocateurs. I argue that the real point of debate between Godard and Debord was beyond the question of plagiarism, which was deemed “necessary” and was explicitly encouraged by Debord and the Situationists; it concerns the political orientation towards tradition, as well as the very status of cinema as an art and an institution in its own right. This is precisely the point of dispute between modernism and what has been called the “historical avant-garde”. However, Godard and Debord converged on what can be called the “passive spectator thesis” on which their divergent practices were based. It is essentially this misdiagnosis of spectatorship that unites the two.
Modernism and the avant-garde
Modernism, in the narrow sense, can be seen as above all characterized by a heightened self-reflexivity and a “pervasive formal self-consciousness”. Central to its project is the idea of artistic autonomy - its independence and separation from the church, the state, and the economy. Modernist art, according to German
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philosopher Theodor Adorno, should be governed by its internal law of form alone. Art achieves its “order of existence” by virtue of its rejection and separation from empirical reality. The avant-garde, however, constitutes itself through the attack on the very modernist credo of aesthetic autonomy. Works of art are not received as single entities, but within certain institutional frameworks and conditions that largely determine the function of the works. The major goal of what art historian Peter Bürger called the “historical avant-garde” was to dissolve the institutional boundaries that confined the reception of art to a separate “zone of experience”, and to reintegrate art into the praxis of everyday life. The avant-garde, therefore, is as much a “culture of negation” as a “negation of culture”: a rejection of the bourgeois concept of culture as such.
Quotation/détournement
Godard’s counter-cinema, despite its formal radicalisms, is not a cinema of total negation. It displays a paradoxical relation to both mass culture and high art. Godard does not eschew appropriating images taken from mass culture, and often oscillates between a critique of mass culture and a “delighted fascination” with it. His modernism consists not in an aversion to ‘low art’, but in the opening of a space in which the ‘low’ can be elevated to be on a par with the ‘high’. For Godard, the canon of ‘high art’ is an important repertoire for both critique and quotation, but never for complete negation. His films are infused with quotations from literature, painting, or classical music. Godard’s quotations often convey a sense of reverence; he is profoundly attached to the idea of art. His insistence on the value of beauty makes his quotations always suggestive of humanistic values. Godard once claimed that “people who speak should find beautiful things to say – recite Shakespeare, for example – or else it’s not worth the trouble to speak. You’re better off keeping quiet.”
If quotation is the attempt to preserve the meaning of a text, Debord’s détournement (diversion or hijacking) defined as “the reuse of pre-existing artistic elements in a new ensemble”, on the other hand, is the deliberate distortion of its meaning. For Debord, there is no room for reverence in a society in which art has decayed and degenerated into pure commodities, there is only totalising critique. The possibilities of authentic creation, Debord argued, had been exhausted as the entire cultural sphere has been turned into a spectacular commodity. The only progressive way of making art, for Debord, is to use détournement as a form of anti-ideological language that “contains its own critique”. Debord’s films, therefore, contain almost exclusively of détournements of existing cultural materials. Influenced by the Letterist cinema of Isidore Isou and Gil J. Wolman, Debord would erase the soundtrack of a found footage, and combine it with a new and often critical soundtrack. The co-ordination of sound and image is deliberately suppressed. Footages of television advertisements, new reels, or documentaries are deprived of their own voice; a direct critique of the images shown on screen or of the contemporary society at large is forcefully inserted into the foreground. 
Reflexivity/direct address
If Godard’s cinema opens up a leeway in which the real empirical world and the fictional world flows into each other, then for Debord, there is no such distinction in the first place. Debord does not need to remind the audience of the artificiality of the film through various reflexive estrangement techniques – he addresses them directly. His perhaps most widely watch film, The Society of the Spectacle (1973), was a filmic version of his book bearing the same name. The filmic medium is used to deliver a theoretical lecture on his theses on advanced capitalism. His next film, Réfutation de tous les judgements, tant élogieux qu’hostiles, qui ont été jusqu’ici portés sur le film « La Société du spectacle » (1975), was a refutation of his critics from the contemporary media such as Le Monde. For Debord, cinema can be a form of address just like an article in a newspaper, or any other forms of direct communication. His last feature film, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), begins with his statement in the voice-over, that: “I will make no concessions to the public in this film… nothing of importance has ever been communicated by being gentle with a public”, and that:
“t h i s particular public, which has been so totally deprived of freedom and which has tolerated every sort of abuse, deserves less than any other to be treated gently. The advertising manipulators, with the usual impudence of those who know that people tend to justify whatever affronts they don’t avenge, calmly declare ‘People who love life go to the cinema.’ But this life and this cinema are equally paltry, which is why it hardly matters if one is substituted for the other.” If Godard’s cinema can be conceptualised as the representation of politics as well as the politics of representation, then Debord’s can be seen as a nonrepresentational cinema altogether. Debord tries to circumvent or transcend the question: what form of representation is politically progressive; he presents people’s everyday life to themselves and challenges them to respond to his critiques.
Cinema of negation/negation of cinema
Debord and other members of the Situationist International did recognise the importance of cinema – not as a form of art in its own right, but as an effective way of communicating revolutionary agitation and propaganda. Cinema, for the Situationists, “lends itself particularly well to studying the present as a historical problem, to dismantling the process of reification” among other possibilities. In In Girum (1978), Debord argued that:
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“It is a particular society, not a particular technology, that has made the cinema like this. It could have consisted of historical analyses, theories, essays, and memoirs. It could have consisted of films like the one I am making at this moment.” For Debord, it is “the society of the spectacle” that made cinema an art form of alienated “noncommunication”. Debord’s cinema, on the other hand, “forces the medium to give way to discussion”, in which the relationship between the spectator and the filmic object would be completely different. The most radical gesture made by Debord was perhaps his first ‘film’, Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952), which contains no images at all. The running time of the film is about eighty minutes, and there is a soundtrack for only about twenty minutes. The rest of the ‘film’ consists entirely of a blank screen. When it was first screened in Paris in 1952, violent protest broke out in the theatre and most members of the audience walked out before the end of the eighty-minute running time. In a gesture no less provocative than Duchamp’s placing of a urinal in a museum, Hurlements, by stripping cinema of images, puts the very essence of cinema in doubt. In the soundtrack, a voice states that: “Just as the projection was about to begin, Guy-Ernest Debord was supposed to step onto the stage and make a few introductory remarks. Had he done so, he would simply have said: ‘there is no film. Cinema is dead. No more films are possible. If you wish, we can move on to a discussion.’ ” D e b o r d ’s films are not made to be works of art, but as an instrument for constructing situations in which the audience ceases to be passive spectators, and take life into their own hands. In other words, Debord wants to “drive the audience from the theatre onto the street”. In Sur le passage (1959), Debord argues in the voice-over soundtrack, that: “There is talk about ‘liberating the cinema.’ … The
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only interesting venture is the liberation of everyday life, not only in a historical perspective, but for us, right now. This project implies the withering away of all the alienated forms of communication. The cinema, too, must be destroyed.” Godard also announced the ‘end’ or the ‘death’ of cinema. However, for Godard, each ‘death’ of cinema only serves to prepare for its metamorphosis. The “fin de cinéma” invoked in Weekend (1967) only paves the way for its rebirth as a cinema that is ready to begin from ‘zero’ in Le Gai savoir (1968). The idea of cinema as an art with certain institutional boundaries that separate it from everyday life is preserved and made more resilient through the multiple ‘deaths’ of cinema. On the contrary, Debord’s work can almost be described as a non-cinema: His objective is not so much to revolutionise cinema as a medium of art than to appropriate the medium for the revolution of the social structure at large. According to Debord, art was in its period of dissolution in the 1960s. The Situationist International, which Debord claimed to be more radical than both Surrealism and Dada, serves as an avant-garde that is preparing its own disappearance. Debord argued that Dada sought to “abolish art without realising it”, whereas Surrealism sought to “realise art without abolishing it”. The Situationists, on the other hand, aimed to show that the abolition and the realisation of art are “inseparable aspects of a single transcendence of art.” When life is liberated from the society of the spectacle, there will be no distinction between the free creation of art and the free creation of society. The realisation and integration of the artistic and the poetic into everyday experience can only be achieved by the suppression of art as a category in its own right. For the Situationists, the point is not to engage in “some sort of revolutionary art-criticism, but to make a revolutionary critique of all art”. In order to achieve this, the Situationist “negation of culture” may take place within culture, but has to “point beyond it” in a “unified critique” of the social totality. This is the reason behind Debord’s resentment for Godard’s cinema. For him, Godard only represents a “slightly freer manner in comparison with the stale formulas of cinematic narration.” His cinema is “conformist” because its innovations only serve to preserve cinema without negating it. Of course, Godard did challenge the economic and institutional setups of cinema, and made self-reflexive critiques of the institution of cinema in his films such as Contempt (1963) and Tout va bien (1978), but his attempts to “make political films politically” never went as far as Debord’s radicalism. Therefore, the dispute between Godard and Debord, can be traced to
the avant-garde’s point of departure from modernism in the sense that what distinguishes the avant-garde from modernism is its challenge to “not only the art institutions but the institution of art itself ”. In this sense, Godard is more accurately described as a reformer, rather than a revolutionary, in the sense that Godard more or less respected the rules of cinema as an institution while trying to stretch it to its limits. Debord, on the other hands, states in The Critique of Separation (1961): “I have scarcely begun to make you understand that I don’t intend to play the game.” Godard’s work was to reconstruct cinema; Debord’s was to destroy it. If Godard’s political films could be described as a cinema of negation, then Debord’s would be a negation of cinema.
Convergence on the passivity of the spectator
Both Godard and Debord arrived at the “passive spectator thesis”. Godard’s limitations are symptomatic of the misconceptions of structuralism. Debord, on the other hand, drew his conclusion via Hegelianism. His book, The Society of the Spectacle, appeared two years after the publication of Althusser’s Reading Capital, and has been read as a defence of the Hegelianism in Marx. According to Marx, humanity in class societies creates the world they live in, yet the world is represented to them as having power over them. Representation, for Debord, is synonymous with alienation, as it is the opposite of direct participation. Representation deprives the spectator of any agency, for it is not a dialogue, but a “one-way noncommunication”. But ironically, Debord’s theory reached the same conclusion as Althusser’s, and it remained largely a philosophical abstraction. The condition in which the working class finds itself, according to both Althusser and Debord, is all-pervasive alienation. For Debord, advanced capitalism has succeeded in colonising all social life with the commodity form. The spectacle, for Debord, is the “representation of the commodity world as a whole which serves as a general equivalent for what the entire society can be and can do.” For Debord, representation means non-action, and being a spectator is the equivalent of being passive: “plus il contemple, moins il vit.” Debord
forecloses the possibility of progressive representation as such: “one cannot fight alienation with alienated forms.” Debord argued that the relation between authors and spectators is a “transposition of the fundamental relation between directors and executants”; it is a “staunch bearer of the capitalist order.” However, Debord’s theory presupposes what French philosopher Jacques Rancière identified as a false opposition between looking and acting, between the author’s capacity on the one hand and the spectator’s incapacity on the other. He fails to see that looking can also be a form of action that confirms or modifies what Rancière calls the “distribution of the visible”. Spectatorship is not synonymous with passivity. His cinema does not blur the distinction between authorship and spectatorship: “it is precisely the attempt at suppressing the distance that constitutes the distance itself.” The unpopularity of both Godard’s and Debord’s political films can partly be attributed to the formal difficulty of their work, but fundamentally, it is due to their shared assumption of the passivity of the spectator. Both Godard and Debord claimed to be the vanguard of the working class. It is perhaps illuminating, to conclude by quoting Bertolt Brecht: “a vanguard can lead the way along a retreat or into an abyss. It can march so far ahead that the main army cannot follow it, because it is lost from sight.” M
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Photograph by Lindsay Schmitt
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by Don Brenner
by James Ralls
YEP, IT SHITS
TRASHY
I ran sixteen miles over sweaty earth dipped in honey over plants with footprints embedded on their flower through corn fields where someone floated in the sky and saw me run over crusty sand dunes into life sized lakes I swam through calm through tidal waves through electrical storms that I watched as I backstroked and saw the moon set as the storm cleared. I ran and swam and was never afraid of left handed robots or miniature elephants lined up from river to stream to broad shouldered aboriginals uncertain of the high five or paper scissors rock and I wasn’t afraid of Bob Dylan of songs sung like stories but I was afraid at mile fifteen of the end of mile sixteen and where I would run when I reached the end as alone as a butterfly who just opened it’s cocoon and found itself with a stick and single leaf in an old mayonnaise jar.
I have decided that I am trash And I like it. It feels good to say, Hey! I am also a cunt. A fucking loser. A crazy nigger with a wild temper... And there is flailing involved, And shouting And banging.
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Oh, the banging. In your head or in your bed. You pick it! And a flanger A lot of reverb Cue stage lights. Get involved in shit. Get shitty. Hey, let’s go get shitty and then get shitty. There’s shit all over me. I’m shitting. I’m shitting too, dear. Noted. Notes. Took notes. Oh my God, No more notes. That’s it. Stop it.
by Michèle Schmitz
THE TIME HAS COME Posters are gliding off the walls Their time has come. Half naked, white surfaces Emptiness, stillness, again stillness. A glass on the writing desk A desk which used to be so full of life, of talking books and expressive pens. The desk lamp is switched off. Random objects are the last ones proving some kind of liveliness here. Shopping bags, used cleaning rags, dustbin, the last piece of chewing gum. But time has come, and all these belongings would know, if they had a soul, That this was a serious moment. It would be their last night to sleep in this position, Their last chance to be present in exactly this position, in this space, having their special role: they used to cheer me up when I was sad, provide me knowledge for my future career, help me through hard times and give me light when it was dark. It feels as if they would exactly know what lies before them Tomorrow they are going to a new place and maybe fulfil a new role. It will never be the same again. Position, time and function will no longer fit anymore the way I can face it now, observing what is in front of me. For the first time, I feel as if these objects, my objects, were talking to me. What they are saying? I don’t know. It just feels as if there was something in the air The lightness of a feather and the shaking of an earthquake. Left alone I can still hear cars passing by, as they always do. But time has come. Tomorrow, they won’t drive anymore. There is not gonna be any tomorrow for this constellation. Not that particular person, sitting in that particular room, writing about these particular things. Time has come: Let’s face it. We are gonna be swept away Destination? Particular time, particular space. But for now, let’s take a deep breath And try to face that emptiness, that stillness. Just let it go
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by Ben Said Scott
LE MARI (Water) Paris is wet today. Aubergine streets with dark skins peeled back. Slimey and wet mushy under touch. Smoke cooks it with its smell Everywhere. The homeless close together - green and grey corregated sheets green and grey shelters which make you cough when you pass. Je veux boire It is at Bastille where the protesters come. Gas bombs and chants and teenagers run. This city of arguing. This city of passions. These people with their cheese and baguette smiles. At night help is impossible : the metro is crowded with piss So you stumble down lost as if you were a brute amongst peerless virgins a market gardener - level crowds. The buildings are to, high-er, crowded, famished dimly lit stairs lead to fifth floors, with views of
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Rue de Lappe
other fifth floors if only pour le plaisir Dormant - This city of love… in the morning you will go but the spots : les jardins, les musées, les tours are full. Tourists are couples, scenes photographed so much that loves washed out with the flashes and you retreat Je vais la Place des Vosges Air Breath Space No. This is not the city I have read about This is not the city I have watched. This is not the city seen through carefully composed cinematography. But what? this city
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by Joe Baldwin
SPRINGTIME HYMNS Sing me some springtime hymns To pull me from my bed, to the bleary sunshine That melts us all to water A faint buzzing in the warm morning air As wind wraps her fleshless arms around me Pulling me into an awoken embrace. My eyes run I’ve forgotten my morning meal And now rivers stream down my face Autumnal showers interrupt the sunlit splendour Reminding me. The hilltop is a place to sit To stare at lives from a distance My feet squelch in the mud as I stand up and walk Along the scorched winding path I sit in my bedroom hearing the buzzing noise again As the heat vanishes into the evening I hope you will sing me some springtime hymns So that I may know what you want.
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by Cais Jurgens
LILY PAD I miss your lovely hair tied up in chaos And your colorful clothes, sometimes only black I miss my arm tingling under your neck for hours asleep And your bedroom parched as the Mojave. I miss the way you brush your teeth in the shower And the way you smoke on the fire escape I miss your wild drawings of roaming hands And frightened people that reach to the canvas edge I miss the corner of your mattress where the sheet slips off and the paint brushes that sprout from the bottom like orchids I miss the subway to your place after work and how your face appears to let me in at the door I miss high cheeks, targets for lips that shine by the lamp and grow softer as I drop kisses like bombs I miss your swagger up the stairs to your room and your singing going down to the world I miss our deli coffee mornings bitter to the street and the platform I miss losing my connection in the mornings going home and after a while not caring to catch it anymore
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LIVE AND STUDY IN PARIS, IN ENGLISH Students don’t need to speak fluent French to study at the University of Kent at Paris as all teaching is in English. French lessons are provided before and during the stay in Paris and living in the city helps students to gain valuable language skills and experience.
ATTRACTIVE HISTORIC SURROUNDINGS The University of Kent at Paris is based at Reid Hall, a beautiful 19th century building in the heart of Montparnasse, just minutes by foot from the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Sorbonne, the Latin Quarter and Saint- Germain-des-Prés. With trips to major museums happening most weeks, students really do get to see the best of Paris.
WORLD-LEADING RESEARCH AT THE UK’S EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY We are among the best research-intensive universities in the UK with staff engaged in research of international and world-class standing. Kent has specialist postgraduate centres in Brussels, Paris, Athens and Rome as well as long-standing partnerships with over 100 European universities.
UNIVERSITY OF KENT
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To find out more, please visit www.kent.ac.uk/paris