Too bad Pi‘s Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) didn’t see “Nature By Numbers” (the first embedded video). Maybe he wouldn’t have gone insane! But then again, seeing the beauty and perfection of the cosmos’ sacred geometry has blow many a mind before. Including this one.

Can “life” keep up with the creeping cycle of desensitization? This trailer for the Discovery Channel’s new series Life offers an excellent example of how current cinematic time and space differs from unmediated experiences. But then again, editing is all a matter of framing and choice, and the Discovery Channel tends to gear itself towards a theme-park thrill ride aesthetic. A film like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker would certainly offer a more meditative encounter, as do other more nuanced nature documentaries that can heighten awareness of that which we have become unaware. It is very difficult for us modern folk to enter into the animal’s “umwelt” (selfworld), so cinema has the potential to help in that process (barring, of course, that we actually re-learn how to communicate with animals).

I have a feeling, though, that the action movie style of this promo will be vastly different than the actual show, which is narrated by Oprah Winfrey. African American women have long been a trope for ancient Earth wisdom (the quintessential example would be Whoopi Goldberg’s Guinan character on Star Trek: Next Generation). Moreover, the program’s marketing claims it’s made by the same folks who produced Planet Earth. It’s hard to imagine they would go in the direction of Roland Emmerich (of Day After Tomorrow and 2012 fame). It would be a truly strange mash-up to have Oprah’s reassuring voice overlaying high-intensity action sequences, or the narrator of the above trailer on top of a Tarkovsky clip.

I want to preface my comments by saying that I support the work of Doctors without Borders, and they were the first organization I donated to after the earthquake in Haiti. With that said, I was struck by the above poster I received in my email. It advertises a documentary about their work that will screen worldwide (click her for locations and more information). At first I thought it was just cheeky sales pitch for donations, framing the work of the organization within the narrative structure of an action film. The image reminded me a little of the Constant Gardener, in which Africa becomes the backdrop for purification of the white man’s soul (as is the case of the Western genre of film).

Now, I haven’t seen Living in Emergency, nor do I intend to demean the humanitarian work of Doctor’s Without Borders, but it’s also interesting to explore this kind of image politics played out by NGOs. This was tackled in Enjoy Poverty by Renzo Martens, a video that explores the commodification of poverty. He contrasts the amount of money paid to professional non-African photographers for documenting violence and suffering versus village photographers who document weddings and family events. He trains the local photographers to sell their images to press, but as you would expect, they are locked out of the market. There is one telling scene in which he brings the photographers to a Doctors Without Borders compound and informs the physicians that they want to photograph starving children so they can makes some money in the international media market. The doctors are outraged, but fail to see that when the press are invited for photo ops, this is what happens. The distinction between news and PR is contested through this intervention.

The Doctors Without Borders movie poster adds an additional dimension, which is the evolution of “pop politics.” In Italy this phenomena is more pronounced, though certainly not absent in other technological democracies. The central idea is that the line between politics and entertainment is erased so that the public sphere is transferred entirely to the realm of television. For example, Prime Minster Silvio Berlusconi becomes the host of the political variety show that mirrors television, and visa-versa. His ministers become show girls (literally several are former models and entertainers), and the two systems intertwine. Like the US, news programs become infotainment. Meanwhile, I have also recently seen car ads that are made to look like movie trailers. With the proliferation of reality TV shows and the tabloidization of the democratic sphere, the aesthetics of participation are blurred so that for anything to penetrate the general consciousness it is necessary to imitate a more familiar form of communication, such as TV. Even the Left plays this game. A leading critic is a comedian whose platform is monologs (likewise in the US Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert play the role of court jester), and a former leftist parliamentarian is on the gamedoc equivalent of Survivor.

This is where the Living in Emergence poster comes in. I can’t help but feel that it draws too strongly on pop politics by invoking the thrills and exoticism that you’d find in an action movie. The determined gaze of the (white) hero dominates the vulnerable and quasi-silhouetted figures of “dark” Africa. There’a a trend in film to depict the southern Other through an amber haze, using lens filters to position these places as if they exist in perpetual setting sunlight– in other words, as transition zones between the light of everyday life and the dark night of the soul (see Traffic, in particular). In Western discourse, usually Europe or the US serves as the stable (green) homeworld, whereas these distant colonial lands become the sites of psychological tests where the hero must find himself.

The flipside is Doctors Without Borders is trying to reach out to new audiences that are unfamiliar with difficult work of NGOs. By putting their work within the context of a familiar narrative structure it may be possible to attract younger people into a world they otherwise would dismiss as irrelevant or unexciting. Such is the state of mediated politics.

Ever had an idea that someone else executes better than you imagined it? Well, here is one of those situations. The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal is one of my favorite short films. For years I have photographed the ephemeral state of street art as if it were an unconscious process of spontaneous creation. This film plays with this idea and does much more with it. Please watch and enjoy!

Though I haven’t seen Food, Inc., this looks to be another promising documentary about our monocultural food system. The film’s trailer starts off with a quick lesson in media literacy by juxtaposing the images of food market/ing with the reality food production. It should be noted, however, that the top PR and propaganda spinners know that people only remember pictures, and not words. So though the narration does a good job of deconstructing the images of the supermarket, one is still left with the pastoral image of an artificially abundant the food system (I say “artificial” because the high yield monocultural crops we are accustomed to are produced on borrowed time by depending on petroleum-based fertilizer that destroys biodiverse soil– a temporary fix that has long-lasting and destructive consequences on the food chain).

Nonetheless, I really like this sequence and hope the film is as compelling. The montage alludes to a deeper suspicion I have that supermarkets are more effective tools of food system propaganda than media. I urge people to consider the psychological conditioning of the market as one of the primary forms of system architecture.

The trailer for the latest film by the Yes Men. Click here for more info.

I’m not going to argue against green tech– it needs all the energy the economy can muster right now. But I want to caution against technological optimism as the solution for our current ecological crisis. It’s a cultural problem, and I hope that people are not blinded by one-sided change in which tech solutions supplant cultural creativity. Both are necessary, but let’s be sure to reign in the technological mindset that sees all solutions as a matter of switching out machines. We have to move from mechanistic to holistic thinking, from centralized energy production to decentralized network distribution, from international trade to local production, from finance to sweat equity, and so on.

You might want to take some Prozac after watching this. More on the documentary here.

I think a good dose of nature is in order.

Link:

A little documentary about Johannes Kreidler‘s “Product Placements” performance: 72,000 samples in 33 seconds. He’s doing the artistic equivalent of a denial of service attack on Germany’s copyright agency, GEMA.

Here is a video of the performance: