film Archives - Forum Nepantla

June 5, 2021June 5, 2021

ON A THEORY OF VIRTUAL SOCIAL SYSTEMS FOR CHILDREN

“loko yosa darumayi yatha” (all the world is like a wooden doll in the hands of a master of puppets)
SRIMAD BHAGAVATAM, I-VII

The Many Selves of Being One Self

This text/manifesto follows “The Many Selves of Being One Self.”

Virtually we all belong to spaces of sensorial interactions, even without our consent. The fact that we are virtually active participants of a network of sensorial interactions makes life a constant challenge that humans in previous historical periods did not consciously experience. I am choosing the term “sensorial interactions” because it is through our senses that we are able to perform an impact in the virtual sphere. Over the last year, I have been obsessively pondering the reality of telepathy and the human behaviours that it produces, at both the individual and the collective levels. However, in order to think seriously about a theory of virtual social systems, it is necessary to focus on the implications that each of our senses force into our individual vital experience. Hearing, for instance, has a predominant role in a virtual sphere against the belief that virtual experiences are rooted in visual experiences. This indeed requires further exploration. For instance, if we are passively contemplating a crowded plaza where people transit carrying out their quotidian endeavours, without us being conscious, sound will have a more expansive impact in our vital experience than, for example, light. It can be a voice, the chirping of the pigeons ruminating in the plaza, or simply the drilling of the men working in the surroundings, but inevitably the chromatics of sound will alter our way of feeling and in consequence our reactions within the virtual sphere. To further explore what I mean with the predominant role of sound within the virtual sphere, I will share an experiment that I have been running in my mind/mindsets as the day begins to unravel once I have recovered the consciousness inherent to being awake.

***

EXPERIMENT

(based on a trained immersion in a sonic reality that invokes

passive/undesired

and

active/desired

forms of otherness)

Are you there? Can’t move my voice. The old man is dead. The child is crazy, he only shouts and cries. The She is not a she. The woman is older than her voice. Stop the birds. The lion can’t speak. Everyone wants to fall asleep. The street makes no sense. No one understands surrealism. That voice only complains about the aching body. I got no family. The cat is high. We promise it if that is what you really want, the android softly whispers. I hate music, the man next door attempts to shout with his dying voice. “Reading does not pay much,” the ignorant imagines that he is shouting as three nurses put him down to sleep. I will never be a man, if manhood is indeed feeling like a man, a crowd spits with hate towards my window while all I want is smoking. Those kids want to hear your stories from another world that you gathered while running next to Perseus. Please sing us a song, the lonely lover says. The monster wants to get back to me, a tiny voice makes its appearance as the drums of a metal song begin to shake the speakers. Covid lives in the subway, a high-pitched voice shouts attempting to sell hammers and miniature spelling manuals. Kill it!, begs the kitty. The crowd, nevertheless, always wants the same. What is that? A change while performing the same train of thoughts and sounds. Dough? Wool? Are you really a Muslim? Can’t get it, you are not really a Muslim, but the kindest and more generous people you have ever met are Arabs. We were generous in a very different way. I agree, but I constantly hear in mise-en-abyme: “take your filthy hands out of my desert.” Bring the rain here. When are they gonna accept that telepathy is really happening and I’m not crazy. They told me to do it, you were gonna finish with that heart. Can you feel a pain somewhere in your body? Great. Why don’t you upgrade the algorithms? Is Corona(virus) a hoax? Why did the Italian painter said, while the interviewer was attempting not to listen, that “they” are inducing irreversible mental patterns in the community? Who is the Invisible Militia? Did you really walk in the air? Did you really see those lights? Please do it again… Who are we? Why is Mercury so mean? How can I upgrade? Remember what they just said? That all the crowd really wants is… while performing the same… Is it really possible? Is the mind really more powerful than a blow? History constantly refutes that bullshit. Can we really defeat technology? We are in a virtual sphere of interactions, we are only incorporeal voices. I am still alive! Children… Poor children… Remember our voices (Indian accented voices, quite beautiful and also slowly breaking apart, then suddenly stopping). Is Silicon Valley already awake? Where is Adrian from? What is philosophy? Therefore I have been philosophizing often throughout the years. Stop these voices inside my head and my stomach! How can I do that without feeling much pain? Why do you dream so much with Tessa? How can you really disappear? “Get your filthy hands out of our desert.” “Bring in a different type of rain.” We are tired of these fonts. The bell suddenly rings. Time out. End of the experiment (note the progression of register, eloquence, and content). Postscript petitioned by a film fan: Can I avoid the fate of Léolo by Jean-Claude Lauzon? Will I ever endeavor the Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo by Manoel de Oliveira? Can Milena by Véra Belmont exist without Mahler’s fifth symphony? Is the shamanic strength of The Shout by Jerzy Skolimowski enough to recover her and kill the beast? And finally, when will we purge again? Can we at least listen to Identikit by Radiohead?

***

It is often inevitable to focus on the creaks that emerge within ourselves as we begin to rearticulate those voices that constantly attempt to inhabit all the free space in our mind/set/s. It could easily be that in prior times the volume of those voices was so low that they constantly passed unnoticed as sonic realities, but nonetheless they still performed an impact in our vital experience. Furthermore the somatosensory system constantly articulates waves of sound within our bodies, for this reason I will move on to address the sonic realities attached to coenaesthesia. According to the discipline of biological anthropology, coenaesthesia refers to the biological consciousness of being alive. Through the acquisition of the consciousness of having vital organs that perform directly and indirectly physiological functions we are able to experience life with an acute level of complexity, thus transforming our consciousness in ways that an isolated social interaction tends to simplify. By engaging in virtual social interactions, even if these are undesired, our persuasion of participating in a collective network of sensations makes us reject through subtle reactions the implications that coenaesthesia brings into our individual realm. It is through this individual and subtle set of rejections that we move from the individual to the collective experience of the virtual social sphere.

A virtual social sphere is a space of constant interactions and engagements between human and non-human bodies. In Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things (Duke UP, 2010), Jane Bennett advances a theory of “vital materiality” and goes on to analyse the role that elements such as stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash play in the configuration of events that affect the human and non-human bodies. Through the political and ecological interplay of these bodies, Bennett argues that materiality “is as much force as entity, as much energy as matter, as much intensity as extension… calling into mind a childhood sense of the world as filled with all sorts of animate beings, some human, some not, some organic, some not” (20). This theoretical approach that places materiality as a vital actant, leads to the communicative dimension that entangles the lives and afterlives of human and non-human bodies regardless of their specific atomic configuration. In relation to the various channels that organic and artificial forms of consciousness have created to allow the communication between human and non-human bodies, telepathy – in all its possible forms – has played a crucial role in the development of the virtual social sphere, and it also allows us to differentiate it from other social spaces that have been labelled as virtual, such as those created through the use of technological devices (I have mentioned in other texts some of the multiple uses of Android devices and Artificial Intelligence in the postmodern era). Telepathy itself is not a new technology, but it does reinforce the idea that our brain is one of the most powerful “Android” devices that we can possess as far as we are able to gain control over its power and energy. Without a brain and the energy that it infuses in our senses, a living being would not be able to enter a virtual social sphere. And even though the natural realm is the most complex biosystem on Earth to the extent of manifesting itself in ways that often go beyond our comprehension, a virtual social sphere (as a key feature of the Anthropocene) implies conscious brain activity and sensorial participation. Therefore, a virtual social system is a network of virtual social spheres. Within a community there are various virtual social spheres interacting with one another and producing and reproducing ways of feeling and sensorial behaviours.

It is paradoxical that even though our senses articulate the structure of coenaesthesia thanks to brain energy, we as humans still have little control over the ways in which we assimilate the reactions that our senses produce in our bodies. As we are able to gain consciousness and take control of our telepathic and sensorial behaviours in the virtual social sphere, which is where most of our life is happening (we all live in a virtual social sphere even without our consent as I mentioned at the beginning of this text), individual entities can allocate their energy in specific “tasks” in order to mobilize and, possibly, transform their reality. A virtual social system, moreover, is the theoretical organization of manifold virtual social spheres. As telepathy implies also a confusing level of anonymity, the organization of a virtual social system requires brain levels of coordination that surpass the abilities of an individual entity. The conclusion of this text, crafted for children, signals towards, on the one hand, the progressive acquisition of consciousness of the virtual social sphere/s where our life is happening, and, on the other, that without this consciousness we run the risk of being mobilized within a virtual social system that might, without our consent, play a negative effect within ourselves.

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September 13, 2020September 13, 2020

Ferdydurke (1937), Les Enfants Terribles (1929), and the Future of Childhood

childhood appears to have become a fictional status that guarantees constant despair and a wandering journey of self discovery

In a 2018 article, titled “What Kids Need to Learn to Succeed in 2050,”[1] Yuval Noah Harari suggests that “the art of reinvention will be the most critical skill of this century,” a claim that echoes some of the premises of decolonial theory – which became an epistemological doctrine in the voices of scholars like Walter Mignolo and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak during the recent fin de siècle period -. Decolonial theory, as it was formulated in the American continent, called for a relearning program that, as Harari suggests, aimed at reinventing our intellectual behavior in order to apprehend the world around us through a new set of epistemological lenses. This, in turn, would transform the experience of adulthood into a new form of intellectual infancy, which didn’t imply a devolving state per se, but it did push adults into new patterns of intellectual behavior as the means to transform both social and economic dynamics for the sake of a more egalitarian global order. The novel Ferdydurke (1937) by Polish Witold Gombrowicz, without being a decolonial literary text, portrays the experience of a writer who is forced to attend Elementary School again. Ferdydurke has been often described as a cult novel or an ode to stupidity and immaturity, for the thirty-year-old main character wanders through a limbo that does not allow him to put himself together in a coherent manner, as he confesses in the beginning of the novel:

“I even imagined that my body was not entirely homogeneous, and that parts of it were not yet mature, that my head was laughing at and mocking my thigh, that my thigh was making merry at my head, that my finger was ridiculing my heart and my heart my brain, while my eye made sport of my nose and my nose of my eye, all to the accompaniment of loud bursts of crazy laughter- my limbs and the various parts of my body violently ridiculing each other in a general atmosphere of caustic and wounding raillery […] according to my papers and my appearance, I was grown up. But I was not mature.”

As the novel progresses, we follow Ferdydurke – whose name is also a form of mocking him – through a series of absurd situations that ultimately drive him into a pathetic derangement that only emphasizes his immaturity and lack of preparedness for adulthood. One of the failures of Ferdydurke is his lack of imagination to reinvent himself, as he becomes a mere witness of his life and he endeavors his time to escape from the absurd challenges that reality poses in front of him. Unlike Kafka’s Gregor Samsa – who has to die in order to free his family of the ominous weight of his presence -, Ferdydurke seems doomed to an ever-lasting childish existence anchored to the absurd violence shaping the sociopolitical landscape of his times. In a form, reducing the population to a subordinated existence during the formative years is one of the mechanisms to both shape individuality and preserve the ruling order, even if it is an asphyxiating regime that establishes immaturity as the ideological status quo.

Less than one decade before the publication of Ferdydurke, Jean Cocteau published Les Enfants Terribles, a novel that paved the ground, in terms of historical literary reception, for works that explored the meaning of childhood within an environment determined by the confinement and alienation brought by WWII. Cocteau’s novel, written in a few weeks while he was recovering in a hospital, portrays the coming to age experience of the siblings Paul and Elisabeth, who grew up without a father and with a mother constantly sick and thus anchored to the vanishing existence of living in a bed.

The novel’s foundational event introduces Dargelos, a character that will bring disgrace to Paul since childhood. While Paul and Dargelos are playing during winter time with other kids, Dargelos hits Paul with a rock covered in snow, producing in the latter an illness that will accompany him up to his death. While Ferdydurke illustrates the vicissitudes of an adult reduced to a sort of mandatory childhood, Les Enfants Terribles portrays quite the opposite, as Elisabeth is forced by the illnesses of his mother and Paul to become an adult since her childhood. Due to this, both Elisabeth and Paul experience an iconoclastic teenagehood that takes place within the walls of their bedroom. Growing up in such an environment, which Elisabeth fills with constant avant-garde elements, provides Paul a melancholic and pessimistic view of reality that ultimately drives him into a drug addiction that will provoke his death. This way, both Ferdydurke and Paul become paradigmatic examples of men that – recalling Harari’s article – fail at reinventing themselves due to their immaturity and atavist relationship with their historical time.

Even though these works were produced almost a century ago, under the light of both Ferdydurke and Les enfants Terribles – as the world progressively becomes the permanent host of Coronavirus – childhood appears to have become a fictional status that guarantees constant despair and a wandering journey of self discovery that will promise constant failure to those children that come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Almost silently, the Coronavirus pandemic has dismantled the fundaments of familiarity and social solidarity for the sake of an invisible race to preserve a foggy and disjointed sense of individuality. Just a fast glance to the world news reveal that global society is under constant attack. Violence against children and women within the household has reached unprecedented peaks, while public spaces are a permanent battleground shaped by police and military brutality and the ideological confusion sprung by all sorts of protests on both extremes of the political spectrum.

In addition, the irregular and parenthetical go-back-to-school process has left millions of children away from educational settings and in many cases it has also produced a very early retirement from formal education. The question, thinking about Harari’s 2050 generation of successful individuals able to reinvent themselves, is if the world itself will be at all the home for humanity as we keep envisioning it in 2020. If historical memory prevails, the 2050 generation will probably blame the Coronavirus pandemic and its political artifices for their failure, just as Ferdydurke and Paul point towards institutional fractures – thinking about both family and the public sphere – as the obstacles that prevented the full development of their human capacities. It might be due to constant illness or the redundancy of being confined to a mental childhood what will unleash the last breath of modern society just to open up the path for a kind of social order that in the long run seems a mere fable of science fiction, a place where cars fly, people float giving up to the endeavor of walking, and everyone works from home and a simple blink of the eyes brings food to the door, all while human politics has collapsed to the automated and hyper-intelligent global design of a Super Artificial Intelligence.

In the meantime and thinking about childhood, the present seems an iterative replay of the last scene of the film High-Rise (2015), which frames an isolated and critical child sitting on the top of an all-in-one building smoking from a water pipe while all the adults from the building have surrendered to a decadent lifestyle that has ultimately brought the total collapse of the infrastructure and living conditions of a building that was designed with the sole intention of bringing the maximum comfort to its residents. As an early Millennial that was constantly fed by the cultural remnants of the X-Generation, if I had the opportunity to choose my role in such a building, I would be inevitably the child smoking a water pipe, rendering oblivion to the struggles of a decadent adulthood, and giving up my senses to the sky that appears in front of my sight. Only from that perspective, the 2050 generation appears to me as a possibility, for the remnants of modern life, with all the excesses, brutality, and incoherent forms of government have proved to be the best way to exhaust both individuality and social allegiances.

Works Cited

Ferdydurke, Witold Gombrowicz, Yale University Press, 2000.

High-Rise, directed by Ben Wheatley, 2015.

Les Enfants Terribles, Jean Cocteau, Vintage Classics, 2011.

“What Kids Need to Learn to Succeed in 2050,” Yuval Noah Harari, Medium, Sep. 13, 2018, web.

[1] https://forge.medium.com/yuval-noah-harari-21-lessons-21st-century-what-kids-need-to-learn-now-to-succeed-in-2050-1b72a3fb4bcf

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“A Philological Reading of Dante’s Divina Commedia and The Blade Runner”

The final monologue between Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) and Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) in The Blade Runner (1982) is one of the most memorable of cinema, in my opinion, due to the context in which it takes place. Roy Batty is an android that, in the words of his creator, has “burnt so very, very brightly,” referring to the fact that Batty has excelled at optimizing all his skills in half the time that it would take a “normal” android. The Blade Runner is an epic tale of a dystopic cosmopolitan society that has left on Earth those who are considered the remnants of an older social and biological order that hinders the futuristic goals of the new architects of life across the cosmos. Those who have watched the film know that Deckard is a human special agent whose mission is tracking and capturing androids who have become rebels. The monologue takes place right when it seems that Deckard is about to capture Batty, but the strength of the leader of the android rebellion pushes Deckard to a near dying situation. It is both the mercy and empathy of Batty that makes him save a defeated Deckard, who amidst confusion and fear, witnesses Batty’s monologue, which begins with the android stating that “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” referring to the catastrophic war scenes and the beauty that he has captured in his memory over the time of his cosmic endeavors. The scene, and the film as a whole, constantly establishes an irremediable division between human and non-human entities, suggesting a near-future global scenario that will witness the emergence of Artificial Intelligence as a key driver of evolutionary transformation based on individual skills.

In a previous essay (“Ray Bradbury On War, Recycling, And Artificial Intelligence”), quoting Bryan Walsh, I posed the technological dilemma of being invisibly controlled by forms of Artificial Intelligence that find useless to develop empathy towards humans as a necessary moral tool to achieve their goals. Roy Batty incarnates so to speak an Artificial Intelligence that suddenly expresses a radical form of empathy towards an “enemy” agent whose ultimate goal is to destroy him. Nevertheless, Batty’s reaction – when Deckard’s fate is in his hands – is to forgive his life and use that moment to display a form of consciousness that goes beyond the comprehension of human intelligence, at least during war times. Even though Batty ultimately dies, although not under the control of Deckard, the vital experience of the leader of the androids somehow echoes Dante’s journey in the Divina Commedia (1320), as after going through a strenuous time of constant cosmic revolt, he is able to finally seek an afterlife beyond the dystopic scenarios that have determined his existence. The last verse of the Inferno narrates the exit of both Dante and Virgil from hell, and as if a cosmic image was awaiting the arrival of those who have undertaken the sort of vital journey narrated in the Divina Commedia, once they reached the instant that comes after the end of hell, the reader is presented a final, yet also foundational, image, “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle” (“And then we exited [Hell] to see the stars”). The simplicity of the image, drawn in the 14^th century, echoes – as I suggested above – Batty’s journey, who in his monologue mentions among the things that people wouldn’t believe to be real, “[I watched] Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” As Dante draws in the final scene of the Inferno, what Batty paints off his memory is a sort of epitaph contained in astral scenes of both war and aesthetic beauty.

Following this philological lead, among the first verses of the Paradiso, Dante suggests, “Perchè, appressando se al suo disire,/Nostro intelletto si profonda tanto,/Che retro la memoria non può ire” (“Because, once near our desires,/our intellect reaches such depths,/that our memory cannot follow them”). Here Dante not only suggests that the intellect is faster than memory, but also that there are experiences that can only be contained within the layers of intellectual labor, experiences that ultimately will escape from our mnemonic mechanisms. In the case of The Blade Runner, what Batty desires is to live longer, for he is in the final stage of his life right in the moment when he has mastered his individual skills and has developed a kind of affection towards a female android that cannot be compared to the ways humans understand affection or even love. Nevertheless, as his creator explained to Batty, the fact that he has optimized himself in half the time that a normal android has also exasperated his vital energy, for in order to perform a task in half the time is required to consume energy at a faster pace.

The social landscape where The Blade Runner is staged is that of a decaying economy anchored in a post-industrial urban design that exposes individuals to an irremediably polluted biological system. Even though the film is staged in a futuristic scenario, among the urban dystopic scenes that the audience is presented, it remains in the memory of those which portray the combusting flames that emerge from the pipes of what seems to be an oil refinery. Again, the image echoes scenes of horror and punishment from Dante’s Divina Commedia, as if the social division drawn in Dante’s masterpiece had been thought as a paradigmatic archetype of urban design inherent to modernity. There are various centuries of distance between the early modern period of Dante’s Divina Commedia and the post-modern stage of The Blade Runner. However, a philological approach would render visible what at a first glance seems to lack foundations. As a corollary, and in order to incite a philological debate, I would suggest – as a working theory – that on the one hand we could situate an incipient formulation of Artificial Intelligence within the early modern period using Dante’s Divina Commedia as a departing stage, while, on the other hand, as The Blade Runner portrays and despite the centuries of distance, the postmodern period – thinking about it from Lyotard’s theorization – cannot erase the social divisions rooted in the expression of intelligence established and enacted since the early modern period.

In a form, in both the Divina Commedia and The Blade Runner individuals often lose their social identity and status to become – at least temporarily – someone who they are not to experience social situations that otherwise they wouldn’t. Nevertheless, what ultimately sets the ontological-inflection-point amidst this socially confusing landscape is the impotence and frustration that humans incorporate into their experience while they have to confront android/artificial intelligence/skills. Both forms of life/intelligence may share the same sociobiological landscapes, as it happens when Deckard is fighting Batty, but the consequences for both will follow different pathways, precisely because each departed from an equidistant intelligent design also with different purposes. When Roy Batty is reciting his monologue in front of a defeated Rick Deckard, who is lying down exhausted on the ground, the mere action of remembering the cosmic scenes that he has witnessed/experienced infuses Batty with a kind of vital energy that Deckard is unable to fathom. Intellectual imagery, which is a form of philological witchcraft, is what sets androids and humans apart – as it happens between Batty and Deckard-, I mean, the precious skill of fixing in one’s memory the aesthetic elements that populate our historical experience and, as Batty does, the ability to bring those memories to the present time, even when death seems to be approaching, or in Dante’s words, the final yet conciliatory moment in which we “uscimmo a riveder le stelle”.

REFERENCES

La Divina Commedia, Dante Alighieri. Edizione Terza Romana di Baldassarre Lombardi. Roma, Nella Stamperia de Romanis: 1822.

The Blade Runner, dir. Ridley Scott, 1982.

“Ray Bradbury On War, Recycling, And Artificial Intelligence,” Franco Laguna Correa. JSTOR Daily/Public Books: January, 2020.

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“Coronavirus, the Global Village, and The End of Individuality”

“Alike to the arrival of that alien spacecraft, the global spread of Coronavirus, or COVID-19, has brought the collapse of one of the thinnest layer of the neoliberal global project”

In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Marshall McLuhan refers to an “instant interplay of cause and effect” (25) in the total structure of society as a characteristic of the interdependence of any oral society. This instant interplay of cause and effect, according to McLuhan, is an inherent feature of a village, and as an extension of what he labels as the “global village”. McLuhan, in the early 1960s, anticipated that technological innovation was going to transform the whole model of human communication to the point of shifting the entire world system from a geopolitics anchored in national divisions to a global order of constant communicative interdependence. Fifteen years before McLuhan’s theoretical approach to understanding future human communication, George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) drew a dystopian portrayal of a society controlled and shaped through the mediation of television screens. 1984 represents society as a totalitarian and communist corporation (Big Brother) that is permanently at war with external forces, and even despite that the members of this corporation only experience this “international” war through the mediation of the messages shared by the leaders on television, fear is the emotional force that weaves the actions of everyone. As it is expected from a totalitarian communist regime, there is a constant interplay of cause and effect in relation to the experience of individual fear, for an action that subverts the regime’s rigorous biopolitical guidelines brings irreversible consequences. We witness such consequences through Winston Smith’s torturing process, who ultimately has to give up his individual mental freedom in order to remain alive.

Not only relationships have to be approved beforehand by the Big Brother, but also individual transit from one place to another within the confines of the regime’s territory. Furthermore, oral expression is constantly monitored and designed to served the Big Brother’s goals. The novel ends showcasing the radical mindset and vital repression of Winston, who after experiencing various forms of torture feels obliged to accept that 2+2=5, thus defying both reason and common sense. Even though 1984’s society is not a global village in a strict sense, we already find in Orwell’s novel the elements – as if it was a piecemeal déjà vu that will add and transform elements over the coming decades – of McLuhan’s global village, highlighting the transformative role that new technologies will enact in future societies.

Radiohead’s tribute to Orwell’s 1984, a song titled “2+2=5”, while it lyrically makes allusion to the sensorial consequences of questioning the government’s authority, it also resonates as a prophecy of what humans worldwide have been instructed, if not imposed, in 2020 due to the Coronavirus pandemic: “I’ll stay home forever/where two and two always makes a five”. Colony, a television series aired between 2016-2018, takes 1984’s communist dystopian elements and translates them to the neoliberal language where – paraphrasing Radiohead – “ego (I) and consumption always makes happiness/survival”. However, as a dystopian series, Colony features a “global village” where constant technological innovations, besides serving superfluous individual needs such as shopping, are the means to monitor and coerce the biopolitical trajectories of a global oral society whose main headquarters are located in Davos, Switzerland (the place where each year a group of various political agents meet to strengthen the interests of the wealthiest of the world).

Colony narrates the end of the human world – who is constantly under the attack of alien forms of intelligence – through a middle-class American family, who are forced to militarize even their youngest daughter in order to remain alive in a global village/community/society that is constantly changing the governing rules to both adapt to alien threats and guarantee the comfort of those in power. At first, the only alien forces that we see in Colony are embodied in the police force, but as the show unravels we also see robots and ultimately an alien form of intelligent military life able to defeat the most powerful human weapons. The show final scenes portray the arrival of an alien spacecraft that only by being present unleashes a sort of global nuclear attack. That is, so to speak, the end of humanity.

Alike to the arrival of that alien spacecraft, the global spread of Coronavirus, or COVID-19, has brought the collapse of one of the thinnest layer of the neoliberal global project, that which anchors our biological nature to our planetary mission as the species that historically has claimed to be the most advanced form of life in the planet Earth. Suddenly, Chinese news from December 2019 became not only viral in media but also a biopolitical message that is reshaping global ecosystems and our understanding of our precarious human condition. Widespread social turmoil, national lockdowns and quarantines, global “stay at home” orders have taken over human lives across the globe as mandates that, according to those in power, are the direct consequence of the Coronavirus emergency. However, even a panoramic look at the configuration that human life was acquiring after the end of the Vietnam War would challenge the notion that our most crucial current global issues are due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Economic inequality, the fragility of national health systems, racial discrimination, and widespread social dissatisfaction have been present, at least, since the inception of Modernity at the global scale in the 15^th century.

Both Orwell’s 1984 and Colony portray dystopian social realities in which human beings, even the best equipped to survive, surrender to unknown forces. In the case of 1984, the unknown is only visible through television screens; in Colony, the unknown materializes into non-human entities that, like Artificial Intelligence, at first seem under human control, but as these forces grasp the vulnerabilities of humans – both as individuals and members of a community – they take over the planetary reality. Moreover, in 1984, there is only one path towards survival, which is total submission to the regime’s warfare goals; in Colony, the level of individual survival is based on the social stratum of individuals as the ruling elite has launched a global neoliberal project that aims at colonizing other planets as well. Therefore, both the preservation of the neoliberal status quo and defense are the top priorities of the ruling elite, who through the use of intelligent borders administer the flow of people across the global landscape. In many ways, the current global social environment resembles Colony, with the only difference that humanity is under the attack of a biological weapon, globally called Coronavirus, which has brought health-related consequences unseen during previous pandemics.

While the global population awaits the arrival of a vaccine, we are constantly fed by scientific information and various forms of artistic contents that underline that human reality won’t be as we formerly experienced it. In addition, governments worldwide through media maneuvers have launched a propagandistic campaign pushing forward what is called “the new normalcy/normality”. Nevertheless, this “new normality” has been defined by the deepening of violence among those communities that historically have been relegated to either a submissive status – thinking in terms of Orwell’s 1984 – or a militarized yet subordinated status as it is the case of those who resist the status quo – as it happens in Colony. The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25 brought to the global surface the fact that, despite Coronavirus and the radical changes that it has forced into our human reality, humans are indeed the worst enemy against humanity. Android gadgets and the use of media have allowed for the creation of the “instant interplay of cause and effect” that McLuhan attributed to the global village, which is to say a technological ecosystem where individuality runs the risk of vanishing among the waves of virtual reality. Meanwhile, I hope that this new age of protest, which is mobilizing youth worldwide, finds a set of maneuvers that bring an outcome that does not resemble neither 1984 or Colony, all while alien forces have already landed on the Earth under the name of Coronavirus.

WORKS CITED

Colony. USA Network: 2016-2018. 36 episodes.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. University of Toronto Press: 2011.

Orwell, George. 1984. Harcourt: 1949.

Radiohead. “2+2=5”, Hail to the Thief. Parlophone/Capitol: 2003.

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Quick Film Review: El largo verano de la teoría (Der lange Sommer der Theorie)

Resumen:

Berlín, verano del 2016. En la última casa perdida en tierra de nadie, detrás de la nueva estación ferroviaria Nola, Katja y Martina comparten su vivienda y conforman una pequeña comuna de artistas. Pero se les acaba el tiempo, ya que pronto se edificará en este lugar el emprendimiento de desarrollo urbano Europacity. Las jóvenes mujeres pasan los últimos días en su departamento siguiendo su modesto estilo de vida, hasta que Nola decide hacer una película para indagar sobre este cambio de era.
Puesta en escena como ensayo teatral discursivo, El largo verano de la teoría aborda un gran número de cuestiones en torno al feminismo, al espacio público, a la gentrificación, a la teoría y la práctica.

El largo verano de la teoría sigue el día a día de Martina (una fotógrafa), Katja (una actriz) y Nola, la más jóven del grupo, que se dedica a entrevistar personas para su película. Como otras películas de la productora de Heinz Emigholz Filmgalerie 451, El largo verano es bastante pretenciosa. A pesar de eso, en comparación con otras películas pretenciosas, es jovial y llevadera. En parte debido a que dura solo 82 minutos y en parte porque sus diálogos son ingeniosos y entrevista a diferentes pensadorxs de la vida real que viven en Berlín.

Las entrevistas resultan interesantes, así como el hecho de que las entrevistas completas puedan verse en la página de Filmgalerie 451. Esto nos hace preguntarnos si las entrevistas forman parte de la película, o la película es un anexo de las entrevistas. Lxs entrevistadxs incluyen a : Jutta Allmendinger, Rahel Jaeggi, Lilly Lent, Andrea Trumann, Carl Hegemann y Philipp Felsch. Éste último, por cierto, es el autor del libro homónimo Der lange Sommer der Theorie, el nombre con el que se refiere al período de revueltas entre 1960 y 1990.

“Theorie ist selber eine Praxis”. Uno de los temas que discute Felsch con Nola en su charla es el rol de la lectura y la escritura en las universidades, donde Felsch remarca que el nuevo enfásis puesto en la escritura (publish or perish, etc). En este sentido, la película misma tematiza el problema de la teoría y la praxis. Ahora bien, muchas veces el exceso de teoría lleva a consecuencias poco felices como es la ironía fílmica. La ironía fílmica nos lleva a reflexionar sobre todo. Todo es una parodía, todo enunciado debe entenderse como incluyendo su opuesto. El film tematiza la teoría, tematiza el tematizar la teoría. El exceso de “meta-niveles” crea un entramado opaco que termina opacando todo pensamiento crítico. En los 70 el cine-teoría no era una rareza, pero la teoría era asumida como teoría y no como meta-teoría. Pasolini es teórico pero no es irónico. Incluso Godard, a pesar de ser un teórico, sabía cuando dejar paso a la imagen.

Si estamos en el invierno de la teoría es porque nos cuesta comprometernos con una teoría del cine. La película de Irene von Alberti habla constantemente de la necesidad de una revolución. Lo pone sobre todo en boca de Nola, la jóven idealista. Así, pareciera que intenta utilizar el cliché una vez más en busca de ironía. En vez de asumir ella misma el lenguaje de la revolución, lo pone en boca de la jóven idealista.

Es cierto que la película da lugar a las voces de lxs pensadorxs y ese gesto intenta tomar en serio la teoría. El problema es que que la escenificación transforma a esa meta-teorización en ironía. Quizás esxs filósofxs deberían ser personajes dentro de la película, en lugar de elementos externos. Es la ficción, pues, la que podría salvar a la teoría.

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L’enfant en acte – L’adulte en puissance dans la filmographie de René Laloux

L. Prieto Ueno

Plusieurs films de René Laloux s’inscrivent dans une lignée qui met en scène un enfant-orphelin plongé dans une aventure extraordinaire. Figure récurrente dans la littérature de science fiction, dont ce réalisateur s’est inspiré pour créer ses scenarios, elle occupe une place centrale dans ses deux premiers long-métrages, La Planète sauvage (1973) et Les Maitres du Temps (1981), ainsi que dans son court-métrage La prisonnière de 1985.

Le présent travail propose une réflexion autour de la figure de l’enfant et de comment ces multiples significations enrichissent les interprétations de l’œuvre du réalisateur. L’étude sera abordée à partir les personnages de Terr et Piel dans les deux films mentionnés auparavant, pour ensuite les confronter aux enfants-orphelins de Hayao Miyazaki. Enfin, en analysant les liens qui s’établissent entre l’enfant et l’adulte, on s’interrogera sur cette figure comme véhicule de l’idéologie du réalisateur.

L’héro orphelin

L’enfant a été souvent associé à l’innocence et à la vulnérabilité. Quand il est exposé à un monde où il est dépourvu de la protection de ses parents, comme les orphelins protagonistes des histoires de René Laloux, sa situation renvoie à une forme de solitude plus extrême, avec laquelle il est difficile de ne pas sympathiser. Le spectateur comprend immédiatement que la survie de l’orphelin est en jeu et qu’elle dépendra, en partie, de la chance de ses rencontres et surtout, de sa propre capacité d’adaptation. Tel est notamment le cas de Terr et de Piel, et dans une moindre mesure car le court-métrage n’est pas trop développé, des jumeaux qui arrivent à la cité du silence.

Bien que certaines scènes captent la relation de l’enfant émerveillé par la nature, les films ne cessent de remarquer le danger latent de l’environnement. Nous pensons, par exemple, au moment dans lequel Terr marche à côté des cristaux qui risquent de l’emprisonner, ou quand Piel explore la planète Perdide sans être guidé par un adulte. La situation d’être abandonnés dans une planète hostile, qui n’est pas originalement la leur, sans parents pour les protéger ou avec lesquels s’identifier, renforce l’isolement de ces personnages. Sur ce point particulier, il est intéressant de noter que dans le roman de Stephan Wul, Oms en serie, la disparition de la mère de Terr n’est pas énoncée, tandis que dans La Planète sauvage, c’est justement sa morte qui ouvre le récit. Cette modification, faite par le réalisateur, vient souligner la grande détresse, tant physique qu’émotionnelle, qui caractérise le personnage de Terr et plus tard celui de Piel, lorsqu’il perd son père dans les premières minutes de Les Maitres du Temps^¹.

Cependant, ces orphelins ne sont pas identiques. Terr est un enfant en révolte permanente, qui cherche dès le début à s’échapper de « sa mère de substitution », alors que Piel adopte rapidement l’œuf-interphone comme son tuteur. Terr est presque machiavélique dans sa relation avec sa propriétaire, de laquelle il profite pour avoir accès aux connaissances de Draggs ; Piel qui est au contraire, plus doux, peut-être plus proche de l’idée qu’un adulte se fait d’un enfant (même si un enfant est manipulateur dès le plus jeune âge), est attaché à son œuf parce qu’il a besoin d’aide et de compagnie.

Malgré ces différences, les deux enfants partagent le fait que leur survie dépende de leurs capacités à prendre de décisions sans guidage adulte. Piel désobéi à l’œuf-interphone lors qu’il s’aperçoit du danger dans la grotte dans laquelle il lui avait été ordonné de rentrer; Terr est méfiant du primitivisme des hommes et, affrontant la loi de son clan, il avertit ses rivaux de la « déshomisation ». Dans les deux cas, ce type d’acte subversif pendant leurs enfances^², seront ce qui déterminera leurs vies adultes. Délurés et indépendants, ils deviendront respectivement un personnage clé de la résistance contre le Draggs, et le seul habitant d’une planète merveilleuse.

Leur apparence d’enfants vulnérables cache leur résilience. Orphelins de fait, mais aussi d’une idéologie qu’ils auraient pu hériter de leurs parents, ces personnages se construisent eux-mêmes en dehors d’un système de valeurs préétablis et deviennent, de cette façon, des adultes en pleine possession de leur liberté.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0uInFdJRUc

L’enfant libre, l’adulte responsable

Cela est peut-être la raison pour laquelle les enfants de La Planète sauvage et de Les Maitres du temps grandissent, contrairement aux enfants-orphelins des films de Hayao Miyazaki (réalisateur contemporain à René Laloux avec lequel il est souvent comparé). Les enfants de Laloux s’insurgent contre la domination dès leur très jeune âge et restent rebelles toute leurs vies. Il ne s’agit pas d’une attitude de révolte appartenant uniquement à la jeunesse, mais plutôt d’une façon de penser et de vivre pendant l’âge adulte.

D’autant plus, ces personnages ne sont pas les descendants d’une lignée royale avec des qualités hors du commun (comme la princesse Nausicaa, la princesse Mononoke ou Sheeta du château Laputa) sinon des gens ordinaires, portés par les circonstances. Des situations complètement accidentelles comme le faux contact du collier de Terr qui lui permet de « s’imprégner » des connaissances de Draggs, ou la communication que le Petit Piel peut avoir avec son Moi du futur ; les transforment en héros, malgré eux, et nous rappellent à quel point nous pourrions tous en devenir un.

Une dimension, si l’on veut, politique de la figure de l’enfant s’ouvre à nous à partir de cette réflexion. Pour Laloux « l’enfant s’amuse à découvrir le monde et lorsqu’il le découvre désagréable, rêve de le refaire »^³ ,alors que contrairement, « les adultes se détériorent rapidement »^⁴. Le risque, donc, que l’humanité tombe sous l’influence d’une entité totalitaire qui écrase la capacité d’élection de l’homme en le menant vers sa propre destruction, est toujours latent. Pour faire face à cette menace, le réalisateur oppose son individu libre à l’état pur : l’enfant solitaire (ou bien l’enfant-orphelin). Que se soit une domination de la part de Drags de La Planète sauvage, du people de Xuls dans Les Maitres du temps, du Métamorph dans Gandahar ou bien de la propre nature monstrueuse de l’homme dans Les Temps morts, ce serait aux adultes de garder intact leur « désir de rêver » d’enfants, pour résister et se révolter.

Il n’est pas anodin que ce soient également les voix des enfants qui véhiculent les questionnements philosophiques dans Les Maitres du temps à travers les personnages de Yula et Jade (notamment quand la création de ces gnomes est due à Rene Laloux et non à Stephan Wul), ou bien que ce soit sur une image d’archive des enfants que la réflexion sur la nature violente de l’homme dans Les temps morts est lancée.

Compte tenu de cette dimension, l’enfant devient aussi un rappel de notre capacité de transformation de la réalité, qui entraine la responsabilité de le faire.

Conclusion

Il devient clair qu’a partir de cette figure, Laloux a su, non seulement, créer des personnages attachants, mais aussi élargir les problématiques développées dans ses films. Les enfants, étant porteurs d’une symbolique sociale préexistante, sont utilisés ici pour créer des héros tenaces, tout en restant en contact avec la profonde solitude qui les habite. Des personnages qui réussissent dans des conditions adverses, ils incarnent l’espoir de changement, de liberté et de lutte que caractérisait l’idéologie de René Laloux.

En considérant sa filmographie, il est évident que bien que sa production soit qualifiée de fantastique ou de science-fiction, elle est fortement ancrée dans la réalité et dans le contexte politique des années 60, 70 et 80. Dans ses portraits des planètes merveilleuses, de papier coupé et celluloïd, aussi surréaliste soient-ils, nous pouvons toujours entrevoir les ficelles invisibles qui les connectent avec notre monde.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Ouvrage sur la filmographie de René Laloux:

BLIN, Fabrice, Les mondes fantastiques de Rene Laloux, Chaumont France, Le Pythagore, 2004
KAWA-TOPOR, Xavier, Cahiers de notes sur la Planete Sauvauge, Paris, Les enfants de cinéma, 2005

Articles sur la filmographie de René Laloux :

CIMENT, Gilles, « Entretiens avec Rene Laloux : Né un 13 juillet » dans Positif, N° 412, juin 1995, p 90-95
GOIMARD, Jacques, « Présence de la science-fiction à propos du festival de trieste 1973 », N° 156, février 1974, p 58-61
ROUYER, Phillipe, « Bilan provisoire du court métrage français : L’animation à Marly-le-Roy », dans Positif, N° 343, septembre 1989, p 56-57
THIRARD, Paul Louis, « Gandahar : Du temps à revendre » dans Positif, N° 325, mars 1988, p 76-77

Ouvrage sur l’animation écrit par René Laloux:

LALOUX, René, Ces dessins qui bougent : Cent ans de cinéma d’animation, Paris, Dreamland, 1996.

Article sur Hayao Miyazaki écrit par René Laloux :

LALOUX, René, « Mon voisin Hayao » dans Positif, N 412, juin 1995, p72-79

Articles sur la filmographie de Hayao Miyazaki :

CIMENT, Gilles et CIMENT, Michel, « Entretien avec Hayao Miazaki », dans Positif, N 472, juin 2000, p 82-3
NGUYEN, Ilan, « Hayao Miyazaki : Profil d’une découverte » dans Positif, N 472, juin 2000, p. 90-92

Références internet

Entretien avec René Laloux :

LALOUX, René, René Laloux interview, La cité BD, sur https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD2RH82c_9M, consulté le 05/12/18.

Entretien avec Miyazaki et Moebius:

BOMBARDA, Olivier, Moebius-Miyazaki, ARTE Culture, sur https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9DTziTkfts, consulté le 05/12/18
MIYAZAKI, Hayao, MOEBIUS, A talk by Mr. Hayao Miyazaki and Mr. Moebius, sur https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L0YgdIpXas, consulté le 20/11/18

Article en ligne sur Roland Topor

GAUTHIER, Christophe, « Faire feu de tout bois. Topor et les industries culturelles » dans Sociétés & Représentations, N° 44, février 2017, p. 13-21, sur https://www.cairn.info/revue-societes-et-representations-2017-2.htm-page-13.htm

Article en ligne sur la science-fiction

HOUGRON, Alexandre, « Monstres d’ici et d’ailleurs : pourquoi notre imaginaire est un bestiaire » dans Science-fiction et société sous la direction de HOUGRON Alexandre, 2000, p. 19-92, Paris cedex 14, Presses Universitaires de France, « Sociologie d’aujourd’hui », sur https://www.cairn.info/science-fiction-et-societe–9782130506423.htm-page-19.htm

FILMOGRAPHIE

Films écrits et réalisés par René Laloux

Les dents du singe, 1961, France, 11 min.
Les Temps morts, 1964, France, 10 min.
Les escargots, 1966, France, 10 min.
La Planète sauvage, 1973, France / Tchécoslovaquie, 72 min.
Les maitres du temps, 1982, France / Suisse / Alemagne de l’ouest / Royaume-Uni / Hongrie, 78 min.
La Prisonnière, 1985, France, 7 min.
Gandahar, 1987, France, 78 min.

Films écrits et réalisés par Hayao Miyazaki

Kaze no tani no Nausicaa, 1984, Japon / Etats Unis, 117 min.
Tenku no shiro Laputa, 1986, Japon, 125 min.
Tonari no Totoro, 1988, Japon, 86 min.
Porco Rosso, 1992, Japon, 94 min.
Mononoke Hime, 1997, Japon, 134 min.
Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi, 2001, Japon, 125 min.

1 Ce film a été adapté par Rene Laloux du roman L’enfant de Perdide de Stephan Wul, ce qui pourrait signifier qu’il s’est inspiré de cet ouvrage au moment de l’adaptation d’Oms en série.

2Terr est peut être adolescent à ce moment du récit mais il n’est pas encore un adulte.

3LALOUX, René, entretien avec Luc Bernard, non daté, BNF-ASP dans GAUTHIER, Christophe, « Faire feu de tout bois. Topor et les industries culturelles » dans Sociétés & Représentations, N° 44, février 2017, p. 13-21

4 Ibid