Esoteric Rabbit Blog

'Let me eat cake, says fallen Alex', The Daily Telegraph: At 3.15pm in Parliament yesterday Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the rest of the Federal Government were engaged in debate with the Opposition in Question Time. Liberal Party MP and former foreign minister Alexander Downer wouldn't know he was at a swanky restaurant with a friend. He clearly misses being important. Listen to him try and talk his way out of it here.

While stranded for three days in Brisbane last year, I was able to catch up with two of my closest friends, Austin and Mark, the latter of whom has commemorated the occasion by making an homage to my self-parodying, though nonetheless honest, Film No. 2. Mark's Film No. 3 (what else?) cites the earlier piece directly in a couple of places, though mostly he references my videoblogs, particularly this one. He somehow managed to gain access to my old room, which has changed a little (new shelves!), and he ends the film with a reference to my history of substance abuse, which I'm pleased to say has changed as well (I'm no longer addicted to aspartame!). The piece also contains the latest in a long line of none too subtle suggestions that I visit Vancouver sometime in the next twelve months. Needless to say, Mark, I appreciate the sentiment.

Articles 10.10.2007 Sydney 'Pork-barrelling Lindsay' 11.10.2007 Canberra/Brisbane 'On Remembrance' 12.10.2007 Brisbane 'Failure to launch' Blog Entries 10.10.2007 Sydney 'Come and see the violence' 11.10.2007 Canberra/Brisbane 'The loneliness of the long-distance tracker' The evening was one of those torturous ones, where writing involves staring at a blank screen until droplets of blood form on your forehead. Outside, the backpackers raged into the night. I sat on my bed, eating Thai food and watching Top Gear, having a minor ethical-aesthetic dilemma. When the obvious story, the official story, is a rhetorical construct designed to obscure ulterior motives, or when politicians engage in pork-barrelling, dog-whistling, or other animal-verb activities, clearly the journalist is morally obliged to say so, the pretense of objectivity, which has done much to hurt journalism, be damned. 11.10.2007 Brisbane 'Matthew, lamenting' Audioblogs 10.10.2007 Sydney 'Caught in traffic' 12.10.2007 Brisbane 'Wireless-less' 12.10.2007 Brisbane 'Everything is not good' 13.10.2007 Brisbane 'Off the record...'

'Gwyneth Paltrow to cook up a storm on Spanish TV', BANG Showbiz: Gwyneth Paltrow is to co-host a new Spanish cookery show. The Hollywood actress, who follows a strict macrobiotic diet, has agreed to present the programme with her chef friend Mario Batali. [...] The Running with Scissors star, who speaks fluent Spanish, said, "I eat lots of Spanish stuff, the crazy fish things and the eels. I love it all. But I still don't eat pork or beef, so I won't be cooking that." She doesn't eat pork or beef. Great. I don't know how she's going to go in Spain, eschewing, among other things, jamón ibérico and chorizo. But hey, I guess she knows what she's getting herself into she is a celebrity, after all. Michael Turtle, 'Young Waiter of the Year announced' (MP3), AM: LUKE MANGAN: Well, in Europe and America it's treated as a profession, and I think we in Australia don't look at it as a profession... [...] NEIL PERRY: It's gone way beyond picking up three plates or being able to pour a glass of wine. It really is kind of the science of hospitality and the understanding of your product that you're selling, which is everything on the menu and everything on the wine list, as well as the philosophy and spirit of the restaurant itself. I'm not entirely sure what the "science of hospitality" is it sounds like the usual Perry hyperbole to me. But as is the case with much of the chef's rhetoric all that fluff about the cornerstone of good cooking and sourcing the fine ingredients is a classic example there's an element of accuracy to the sentiment even as its expression is a bit silly. And given that the staff at Rockpool Bar Grill are among the finest in Melbourne (after a reportedly rocky start), I'm more than willing to concede that Perry probably knows what he's talking about.

Phaedra Doukakis, quoted by Emma Griffiths, 'Caviar delicacy may disappear from menu', Correspondent's Report, ABC Radio National (mp3): There's a whole thing where it pops in your mouth and it's got this nice balance between salty and fishy. So you can see, okay, fine, it tastes good. And I like food, I'm a foodie, whatever. But you know, it's one of these things where it's a luxury item, it is not necessary for anyone's survival. You're going to eat caviar because of status, because you can, because you can afford it, but it's not necessary. So we could actually be driving species towards extinction for something that's completely unnecessary and just sort of a luxury. Most of Melbourne's luxury restaurants Vue de monde and Rockpool Bar Grill, for example choose to serve Sterling caviar from sturgeon farmed in the United States, rather than Beluga caviar from the Caspian Sea. Rockpool's philosophy, while not mentioning caviar explicitly, nevertheless emphasises that the restaurant "source[s] from wild sustainable fisheries or environmentally sound aquaculture" and that "most of our produce is organic, or at the very least farmed in a clean and green way."

QuickTime, 7.56MB

Deleuze in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, via Out of Joint: Cinema ought to stop 'being cinematic', stop playacting, and set up specific relationships with video, with electronic and digital images, in order to develop a new form of resistance and combat the televisual function of surveillance and control. It's not a question of short-circuiting television how could that be possible? but of preventing television subverting or short-circuiting the extension of cinema into the new types of image.

The XIII Biennial Conference of the Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand looks like it's going to be pretty good value. Scanning the list of speakers for names I know, a few jump out at me: Bill Routt ('It's the hundredth anniversary of The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906): Should we care?', with Ina Bertrand); Rolando Caputo ('The Historicity of Gesture'); Adrian Danks ('Domesticating the Archive: Re-Presenting the Australian Home Movie', which sounds rights up my alley); Barrett Hodsdon ('Auteur Games'); George Kouvaros, whose book on Cassavetes is a must-read (The Misfits and Late Style); Christian McCrea ('"It Was Not A Significant Bullet": Beautiful Images on Ugly Screens', which is about what a video iPod does to Herzog). Pouring over the program, session titles jostle for my attention: 'The Short Horizon: Historical Insecurities in Film Theory and Practice' by Tom Redwood; 'Australian Film Theory Criticism 1975–85' by Deane Williams and Con Verevis; 'Digitising Memory Traces' by Dirk De Bruyn. The highlight, however, undoubtedly and unsurprisingly, would have to be Adrian Martin's plenary session, 'Stop the World, I Want to Get Off: Uses and Abuses of the 'New Cinephilia''. Here's the abstract: There has been, in recent years, an enormous amount of discussion (books, essays, conference panels, reams on the Internet) devoted to cinephilia the love of cinema and its practice, whether in acts of writing, curating/programming, teaching or filmmaking. But certain excesses and contradictions in the current discourse are disconcerting, to say the least especially to anybody who, in any fashion, chooses to define themselves as a cinephile. There is now practically a master narrative, a myth or legend concerning the rise, fall and comeback of cinephilia from the gloriously innocent '50s, through the 'rise and ideology' in the '60s and '70s, and finally to the triumphant current 'return of the cinephile'. In this supposed age of the 'new cinephilia', where bits of films are yoked to powerfully fashionable theories of memory and modernity, it's worth trying to intuit what ongoing cultural battles are hidden behind what Paul Willemen once called the "smokescreen" of the cinephile passion, and what lessons are to be found in the writing of its history. The conference begins on November 17. You can access the program here and the full list of abstracts here. Some of the papers are already available online in the latest issue of Senses of Cinema.

I haven't much to say about videoblogging as of late, primarily because of the speed of my internet connection, which simply isn't fast enough for me to download increasingly and unnecessarily large video files. Out of sight, out of mind, as the old saying goes, and I've simply lost interest in all but the return of Chasing Windmills. I never really paid much heed to the point made by Adrian Miles' vogma manifesto about respecting bandwidth, though in retrospect I probably should have; for all the rhetorical arguments to the contrary, the vlogosphere isn't really that democratic a place. Not only is it blind to the digital divide, which it more or less flatly ignores, but its increasingly high technical standards make it virtually impossible for many people to partake, including people like myself who used to be in the thick of things. And as I sit here on the outer, only occasionally looking in on the petty factional squabbling, I can only muse that the citizen's media crowd has confused itself a small and relatively elite clique for the citizenry in general a much broader group for whom the agency offered by videoblogging remains out of reach and out of the question, and whose problems it probably wouldn't do much to help anyway, at least not on any practical level. But the vlogosphere's self-deluding and self-aggrandising substitutism isn't actually what I want to write about here. No, that's a complaint for another day. What I'd actually like to write about is the ongoing noise (can it really be called a discussion?) surrounding the unnecessarily prickly question of what a videoblog actually is, a question with a very straightforward answer that shouldn't be nearly as controversial as it continues to be. There are, as I see it, approximately three positions one can take on the matter, each with its own adherents in the current fracas. The first, which is actually a non-position, is that it's too soon to tell what videoblogging is, that the medium is constantly evolving, and that we shouldn't try to hedge things in with restrictive definitions. This argument, which, to the extent that it can be said to oppose any attempt at positing an eternal essence of videoblogging, is actually quite valid, ultimately aims to shut down any and all debate on the matter before it even begins. However, while, yes, videoblogging is constantly changing and evolving, and while, no, we can't posit the essence of videoblogging (or anything else), we can at least establish a set of conceptual parameters in other words, a definition within which we can situate it as a medium and as a practice, itself an important undertaking. The other two arguments, which I turn to now, are at least attempting to establish these parameters, and are, therefore, at least in my opinion, considerably more productive. The first of these is what we might call the definition-from-content position, which is the more widely held of the two, not to mention the more inane, restrictive and illogical. According to this argument, a videoblog is defined, first and foremost, by its content ('content' in this instance referring less to a certain type of profilmic event and more to a particular mode of address and its requisite codes, conventions and tropes). What discredits this argument, at least in my mind, is that the type of content said to define a videoblog is not, in fact, unique to videoblogs, nor, indeed, to any other medium. The type of content in question is essentially video in the home mode of visual representation, as discussed by James M. Moran in his book There's No Place Like Home Video, though admittedly, in the case of videoblogging, this content is now intended for an audience significantly larger than that of most traditional home mode artefacts. One of the most fervent spokespersons for this position is Michael Verdi, who not too long ago, again wrong-headedly, implicitly argued in favour of a definition-from-authorial intention position (which I rebutted in an as-yet-unpublished article, which will now undoubtedly seem out of date). Less admirable in intention than his previous argument, primarily for being more restrictive, Verdi's current position would have it, ludicrously, that texts as diverse as Super 8 home movies, avant-garde films, certain feature length motion pictures, and others, regardless of when they were made or how they have traditionally been distributed and exhibited (regardless, in fact, of whether or not they've even been online), are all videoblogs, simply by virtue of a shared aesthetic. And while I am not arguing that these texts are not potential or latent videoblogs (in the same way that I wouldn't argue that private home movies don't have the potential to become cinema or television, an argument which films like Capturing the Friedmans and Tarnation obviously disprove), to say that videos are videoblogs before they're uploaded into a networked space is patently absurd, or at least it is to me. Which leads me back into the fray, taking up the position which I continue to hold with Miles and a few select others out here on the vlogosphere's lunatic fringe. I am in favour of what we might call a definition-from-mode of distribution and exhibition position, which is to say a position that defines a videoblog based on certain technical criteria relating to what it is that makes it networked video and thus what separates it from other modes of distribution and exhibition. As Miles put it recently, trying to define videoblogging on the basis of content is . . . problematic. Blogging (as an obvious relative) is less defined by content than by a particular style, and a series of technical (formal) requirements. This is good. A book is similarly defined (serial pages, bound and contained within a cover), as is film (serial sound/image on a linear substrate that is played through a projection device). I don't wish to list the necessary technical requirements for video to become networked video or for networked video to become a videoblog here (note that I consider 'networked video' and 'a videoblog' to be two different things, the latter requiring a more restrictive definition than the former, the former having a openness I greatly prefer). Such a list is not what this post is about, and, even if it was, I think I've already gone on long enough. It's important to note that the position I hold has absolutely nothing to do with defining genres and modes of production within videoblogging itself (I tried to start that project here, but didn't generate much interest), but rather with defining networked video and videoblogging as forms. This may well be the reason for so many of the current misunderstandings (it's also why I think Adrian was wrong to call videoblogging a genre way back when, a move that has resulted in nothing but confusion). Indeed, the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that these two groups are ultimately trying to define two different things the first a genre, the latter a medium and until both parties realise this the likelihood of which seems slim the fracas is bound to continue.

Step 1. Wake up. Step 2. Light a fire. Firelight is now is finally online. Enjoy.

My close friend, netball team-mate and I'll admit it personal hero, Mr. Brady, has officially launched his campaign for global pop domination with a profile on triple j Unearthed. Fresh from his appearance on More Amore and his guest interview on Radio Adelaide's Snap, Crackle, Pop, Mr. Brady, a.k.a. John, is currently finishing work on his second album, which I anticipate with much fervour. His music is relatively catchy think advertising jingles set to 70s pop rock and made sexy and will hopefully be taking Melbourne's live music scene by storm sometime before the end of the year. Check it out. It's just a dream.

Does anyone have any idea how to fix Spam Karma 2 when it starts telling me that it "can't open file: wp_sk2_spams.MYI"? You'll have to e-mail me your suggestions, because I'm leaving SK2 on. Silence is preferable to spam. UPDATE: Thanks to Adrian, who suggested I try Akismet, at least for the time being. Comment away, folks.

QuickTime, 14.4MB links: Mr Brady

QuickTime, 3.6MB

I've had an increased number of hits as of late, in part because I think Adrian Miles has recommended my blog (among others) in one of his classes at RMIT. Given that Adrian (who I still haven't met) was probably pointing out my blog for its videoblog content (practical, theoretical, neither or both), and that, in addition to this, I failed to mark my one year vlogoversary last month, I thought I might revisit, for the sake of some of the newer visitors (and perhaps for some of the older ones), my favourite videoblog entries (this one and this one not included), in alphabetical order. 'An Acquired Taste?' (30/08/05) Ostensibly my most cliché entry in terms of content and mode of address, this video was also intended as a kind of meta-commentary on the near-obligatory rite of passage that is the personal videoblogger's self-shot cooking video. The entry can in this respect be seen as somewhat closely aligned with some of Richard BF's the tongue-in-cheek work on the same genre. 'Adrian Martin on the Australian Film Industry' (09/08/05) One of the highlights of the 2005 Brisbane International Film Festival was not a film, but a panel discussion, notable for Adrian Martin's impassioned discourse on Australian cinema and his assertion that "we don't have enough models in our mind of what is possible in cinema anymore." This entry can be seen as one of the few times I have tried to mobilise the diffusive power of the videoblog format in an almost journalistic way (I tried it again, with less success, at the SPAA Fringe). 'Arctic' (23/12/05) A kind of unofficial sequel to Notes from the Arctic Circle, I find this video incredibly sad (despite Dave and my laughing, which is more a baiting technique than a sign of genuine amusement). People complain about talking head videos, as if such content would be better suited to audio or text, but I think there's something interesting about that mode of address, particularly for the way in which, as you can definitely see in this video, it encourages a kind of performance of the self, which is visual as much as it is verbal, that I think can be incredibly telling (I also harbour a love of the face that audio and text just can't satisfy). 'Carp Caviar' (25/12/05) "I've been digging the visual rhythm coming out of Esoteric Rabbit for a while now," wrote Bottom Union's Erik when I made this video for his collaborative 'Carp Caviar' project at the end of last year, a piece that is at once both completely different to everything else I've done, and yet, simultaneously, can be seen to embody everything else I've done in a purer and more explicit form. That Erik could see this without any prior prompting from me was pleasantly vindicating. 'I Realise You're a Bitch' (25/07/05) "But song, can you woo someone in song, Dave?" "Not with my voice." 'Kite Circuit: Auditions' (26/06/05) This isn't a particularly wonderful video or anything, but I like and have included it for two reasons. The first is that it demonstrates how I don't wear my heart on my sleeve, but rather betray it through my camera, which is just as bad. There's a shot in the video (a zoom-in, to be precise) that initially prompted my friend Mark to ask if I had feelings for the person I was shooting. There are examples of this sort of thing all throughout my videoblogging work, including some more recent ones (as I mentioned recently), which I think open up a number of questions about primary and secondary identification in videoblogging, point-of-view, and so on. The other thing I like about the video is its overall narrative arc, the way the feelings indicated by that aforementioned shot are all but gone by the end of the video. I like the way that narrative has a tendency to emerge from the ether of everyday singularities in these videos. 'Kite Circuit: Day 2, Part Two' (04/10/05) Many of the people who experienced the production of Kite Circuit through my daily videoblog entries last October found themselves becoming very quickly enamoured of the film's art director, Charlie, an easygoing Californian with a laisser-faire personal philosophy and a killer Mao tee-shirt. Representative of many of the Kite Circuit videoblogs, which I think, as a series, can be seen to constitute an almost autonomous work, this video is of particular interest for Charlie's leading role in it. 'Pick Me! Pick Me!' (22/05/05) In retrospect, this video clearly looks forward to my 'Short Studies in Self-Representation and Performance' (see below), though at the time it really was just a short collection of outtakes that I found kind of funny. In fact, videoblogging has proven a wonderful platform for releasing this kind of, not behind the scenes per se, but rather purely extraneous, material, including rough cuts and rushes, camera tests, and other miscellaneous niceties. 'Short Studies in Self-Representation and Performance: Stalker' (04/05/06) The first in what I hope will be a series on self-representation and performance in personal videoblogging, or at least the first step towards some larger written project on the same, this video garnered more attention that I thought a ten minute talking head video would do, people obviously somehow relating to my strange desire to stalk a girl (who turned out to be gay, just for the record). 'The Sound of Pushups' (01/10/05) As I write in my (supposedly) forthcoming genealogy of videoblogging practice and aesthetics: 'The Sound of Pushups' presents a quotidian yet sufficiently novel (or at least unnervingly strange) event myself exercising to Rodgers and Hammerstein's 'Sixteen Going On Seventeen' which is of interest in and of itself, irrespective of its contextual relation to my life or the rest of my videoblog (the wholes of which it is a qualitatively constituent part). In this way it functions very much like the contextually abstracted electrocution of the elephant in Edison's early actuality [and therefore constitutes an example of videoblogging's adoption of early cinema's aesthetic of attractions].

QuickTime, 10.3MB

QuickTime, 27.1MB links: More Amore; 'No More "Amore"' This video is a couple of weeks late, but no matter.

FILMS: Funny Ha Ha (d. Andrew Bujalski, 2003) CHAPTERS: 'Game Design as Narrative Architecture' by Henry Jenkins (from First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, Game by N. Wardrip-Fruin and P. Harrigan) 'Run Lara Run' by Margit Grieb (from ScreenPlay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces by G. King and T. Krzywinska) ARTICLES AND ESSAYS: 'Cinematic Camera as Videogame Cliché' by David Thomas and Gary Haussmann 'The Diverse Worlds of Computer Games: A Content Analysis of Spaces, Populations, Styles and Narratives' by Jeffrey E. Brand, Scott J. Knight and Jakub Majewski 'Driven' by Adrian Martin 'Elephant: The Physics of Violence' by Michael Sofair 'Matthew Barney versus Donkey Kong' by Wayne Bremser 'Monstrous Beauty and Mutant Aesthetics: Rethinking Matthew Barney's Relationship to the Horror Genre' by Henry Jenkins 'A Multi-Dimensional Typology of Games' by Espen Aarseth, Solveig Marie Smedstad and Lise Sunnanå 'The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame: Some thoughts on player-character relationships in videogames' by James Newman 'The Narrative and Ludic Nexus in Computer Games: Diverse Worlds II' by Jeffrey E. Brand and Scott J. Knight 'Navigable Space' by Lev Manovich 'What is Digital Cinema?' by Lev Manovich 'When Seams Fall Apart: Video Game Space and the Player' by Laurie Taylor

QuickTime, 5.3MB

QuickTime, 12.5MB links: More Amore; Mr Brady

QuickTime, 8.7MB

QuickTime, 52.3MB For those of you concerned about the size of the video, writes Austin: I might take a crack at re-encoding the video later, but it would be to the same link and I'll be sure to let you know if I do.

FILMS: The Hearts of Age (d. Orson Welles, 1934) Femme Fatale (d. Brian De Palma, 2002) Macbeth (d. Orson Welles, 1948) Mr. Arkadin (d. Orson Welles, 1955) V for Vendetta (d. James McTeigue, 2005) CHAPTERS: 'The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde' by Tom Gunning (from Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative edited by Thomas Elsaesser Adam Barker) ARTICLES AND ESSAYS: 'Against Insight' by David Bordwell 'Cinema/Ideology/Criticism' by Jean-Louis Comolli Jean Narboni 'Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator' by Mary Ann Doane 'The Film of Memory' by William D. Routt 'Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus' by Jean-Louis Baudry 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation' by Louis Althusser 'Masquerade Reconsidered: Further Thoughts on the Female Spectator' by Mary Ann Doane 'School's Out? Never!: David Bordwell Keeps Working the Room' by Chuck Stephens

This is a picture of me and my brother Sam out the front of the men's toilets at an Italian restaurant in Mount Gambier. Sam turns eighteen today.

Anne Walk of loadedpun has written an nice little post on my recent videoblog entry, 'Stalker': While seemingly offhand and unstructured, Clayfield's discussion about the girl who gave a seminar about Lacan is an important element to the narrative. Lacan, a French psychoanalyst, bases his theories on the idea that the 'self' is a construction and that we cannot truly escape our unconcious body (appetite). According to the video and his vlog writings, Clayfield intends to do a series of videos this year that address the concept of self how we represent or perform our identities based on the expectations of society. This topic is of special interest to me as someone who finds the idea of confessional blogs and vlogs fascinating. Why this need to perform the self on the web? Does the audience confirm our self-perception? In the accompanying post, Clayfield tells of how, after shooting this video, the girl in question appeared yet again and he was smitten once again. This may or may not be true it's so hard to tell with constructions of this kind but, if it is true, Matthew, let us know how it ends (or begins). Well, firstly, Anne, yes, it's true; and secondly, it sort of begins and ends at once. EDIT: I originally had the rest of the story posted here (Stu read it), but I've decided to take it down. I was a little blunt and my tone could have been taken the wrong way, even though no offense was intended. Suffice to say, for those of you who are interested, I have a new, albeit platonic, friend, and that itself is a wonderful thing.

Up until I started writing the brief, precursory notes that follow, I was really struggling to come up with a topic for one of the essays I have to write this semester; now it seems pretty obvious that Ferrara is the way to go. Unfortunately, this entry has suffered a little as a result, implicitly and explicitly posing a number of problems that it simply doesn't go on to answer, namely because I haven't yet thought through them all myself (and every time I try to, I wind up creating several more). This entry, then, would best be considered less a piece unto itself and more an embryo for something to yet to come. What we find in Ferrara's work, I think, is an assertion of the flux, plasticity and fundamental unknowability of the sensible world as we inhabit it, an assertion that leads Ferrara to draw provocative parallels between the human body, on the one hand, and the cinematic image, on the other. More specifically, it is the human female that most fully exemplifies this parallel and these qualities for Ferrara, who sees in her, it and them evidence of authenticity and vitality, a kind of proof of life. The male of the species, by contrast, while more than capable of attaining these qualities, is hampered by an insatiable drive towards a stable identity and the reassurance and meaning offered by his own ossified masculinity indeed, to dip cautiously into the hazardous waters of high theory, he is drawn towards a falsifying ego and the Lacanian imaginary (or, in somewhat more Deleuzian terms, the male, for Ferrara, finds himself concerned with being at the expense of becoming). I think that this worldview which is at its most fully and masterfully articulated in New Rose Hotel, where it functions as the central organising principle of the work, shaping its narrative and thematic content as well its overall formal structure is essentially feminist in nature. Of course, it isn't nearly as simple as this, though I do ultimately think it's fair to say that Ferrara is one of the truly great feminist and indeed, humanist filmmakers. Needless to say, I hope to explore all this in a little more detail in whatever I wind up making of these notes, though for the sake of this entry I'm going to avoid problematising the argument too much. The greatest of Ferrara's films, New Rose Hotel takes as its project the collapsing of binary oppositions, engaging in a movement towards life conceived of as a spectrum or field of infinite points, forms and possibilities, a movement that is not always easy or pleasant and may in fact necessitate something as existentially terrifying as the denial and destruction of the self. The tension implied by this Ferrarian project exists and functions on at least six levels in New Rose Hotel: (1) in the narrative, internalised by the character of X, who struggles (like many a Ferrarian male) with the terrifying notion of liberation from the safety and stasis of masculinity and identity (which are represented in the film by Fox); (2) in terms of performance, between Walken's predictable ticks and gestures and Argento's enigmatic volatility; (3) in the film's images, marked as they are by Ferrara's simultaneous admittance of the aleatoric and chance, on the one hand, and his inevitable desire to maintain some semblance of directorial control, on the other; (4) between reality and fiction, with a number of narrative, performative and formal elements blurring the lines between these two poles and breaking down (or at least calling into question) the validity of such arbitrary definitions; (5) between the audience's misguided Enlightenment-era notion of the image and visuality as an adequate source of knowledge and power (a notion shared by the narrative's male characters, not coincidentally) and the Ferrarian notion of the image as an opaque quagmire of unknowability; and (6) between the supposedly masculine/active nature of the cinematic gaze (the camera, the spectator, the male, X and Fox) and the feminine/passive nature of that which is gazed upon (the screen, the image, the woman, Sandii), which, in actual fact, is far from passive, actively eluding and frustrating the gaze, rendering it powerless and thoroughly redressing the balance. As regards this sixth and highly contentious point, it might well be said that even if Ferrara does disempower the gaze and empower that which is its object (as I believe he does), a number of questions still remain as to the nature of the (supposed) division of labour in cinema that automatically sees the beholder of the gaze as male and the object of the gaze of female, regardless of the values attributed to these positions. I am well aware of this problem and hope to address it (with recourse to Hitchcock and Tania Modelski) in my longer essay. What Ferrara's work proves, I think, is not that the cinematic image is fundamentally or always feminine, nor that what is gazed upon is always imbued with an un(der)acknowledged subversive potential these are, after all, exactly the sort of absolutes the filmmaker himself would insist one struggle against. No, what Ferrara proves is that these configurations are viable possibilities. It necessarily follows from this fact that any theory about the metaphysical (or gendered) nature of the cinema must ultimately be taken as little more than a conceptual framework or model for better understanding the way certain individual films and sometimes not even entire films, but individual scenes and sequences operate and make meaning in their specificity. Ferrara's work thus can be seen as proving that paradigms can (and should?) be thoroughly contested; his work opens up, by its very existence, a significant and evident breach in the cinema, making anything and everything possible, and necessary. SEE ALSO: girish Elusive Lucidity Drifting Long Pauses Like Anna Karina's Sweater Supposed Aura Charles Bronson vs. God Detoured Flickhead Richard Gibson Ed Gonzalez Cinephiliac Coffee coffee and more coffee The Evening Class More than Meets the Mogwai when canses were classeled... Screenville Hell on Frisco Bay

QuickTime, 39.8MB One of the things I want to do this year, in line with my thesis proposal, is further explore the modes of self-representation that exist in my own work, including my videoblogging. This video, which more or less marks break in style when compared to almost all my other videoblogs (except this one), is to be the first in what I hope will be a series of direct-to-camera addresses in which self-representation, performance and storytelling are examined, however implicitly, through practice. A curious sidenote to the story I tell in this entry, meanwhile, is that on Wednesday night, after having made and rendered the video, I went to cinémathèque with Lucio and told him that I was going to blog it. No sooner had I done so than who should appear at the top of the escalator than the girl the story is about. I nearly had a cardiac arrest and eventually had to sit down. In the break between films, I tried to find her, to finally make good on what I'd thus far failed to make good on, but unfortunately inevitably wasn't able to find her. Needless to say, on Monday I'll finally have a decent motive, some valid reason to approach her: "Hey, didn't I see you at cinémathèque the other night?"

QuickTime, 1.85MB

FILMS: Funny Ha Ha (d. Andrew Bujalski, 2003) The Gleaners and I (d. Agnès Varda, 2000) The Gleaners and I...Two Years Later (d. Agnès Varda, 2002) Kings and Queen (d. Arnaud Desplechin, 2004) Last Days (d. Gus Van Sant, 2005) New Rose Hotel (d. Abel Ferrara, 1999) Tropical Malady (d. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004) Vladimir et Rosa (d. Jean-Luc Godard Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1970) MUSIC [...]

Borrowing the idea from infinite thØught and Adam Kotsko, here's my take on the holiday love meme, or: the ten eleven blogs (and videoblogs) I feel the urge to check most frequently. 1. Drifting 2. Elusive Lucidity 3. Chasing Windmills/jadelr's notebook 4. blimps are cool 5. The Road to Surfdom 6. Digital Poetics 7. vlog 3.0 [a blog about vogs] 8. Richard BF 9. girish 10. Like Anna Karina's Sweater 11. Chained to the Keyboard