The Girls of Kamare: not Die Hard 4
Jul. 11th, 2007 10:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI ran into Arling and Cameron, pasticheurs extraordinaires, in a cafe in Mitte yesterday. They're working on a Sony Playstation soundtrack at the moment. They mentioned they'd been to see "Die Hard 4" the night before. "It was the perfect entertainment," said Richard Cameron, "it just made a lot of noise and violence on the screen, and then afterwards I couldn't remember a thing about it. I didn't even dream about it."
"Ah, perfect low fat entertainment!" I laughed. "Personally, though, I wouldn't even think of going to see that kind of American film." Somehow, I don't think I could escape being just a bit infected by the film's outlook, its view of human life, its value system, its editing style, whatever.
When I got home I loaded up the indispensable Ubu Web (who needs a video store nearby with Ubu Film online, and who has such a great and subversive video store in the hood anyway?) and watched a Situationist film by René Viénet, The Girls of Kamare (1974). Following up his 1973 détournement of a kung fu flick, Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, Viénet uses scenes from two Roman Porno films, Teruo Ishii’s Wild Woman Boss Story - Total Lynch (1973) and Norifumi Suzuki’s Horror High School Women - Violent Lynch Classroom (1973). Viénet adds some scenes of his own -- people fucking on top of books about China, mostly.
This movie immediately gave me a great sense of freedom and possibility. There was the sex and violence of the original, sure. That was all intact. There was the curatorial brilliance of getting to see a Norifumi Suzuki film from his most creative period in the mid-70s (the time of films like Hot Jump Mimizu Geisha, Tokugawa Sex Ban, School of the Holy Beast and Dolls of the Shogun's Harem). There was the underground energy of the zooms and edits, the fake blood and sperm, the Gainsbourg-like music on the soundtrack, the popping and scratching of the print. All these were pleasures.
But there was also a Brecht / Godard / Kathy Acker-like alienation thing going on -- these subtitles that turned the whole thing into a diatribe against the dissolution of revolutionary beauty. Sure, you could talk about Woody Allen's What's New Tiger Lily or Tarantino's Kill Bill, but those films entirely miss the political dimensions here, the sense of dangerous liberty and social critique. This stuff makes Tarantino look like the Antiques Roadshow. Sure, some of it -- the constant digs at Le Nouvel Observateur or the anarchists or Simone de Beauvoir -- is a bunch of obscure in-jokes for hip, embittered Parisian soixante-huitard revolutionaries. Sure, it's deliberately amateurish and silly and over the top. That's the point, and that's how the liberty gets generated.
Hip embittered leftist purists at a (bicycle) drive-in is the audience this film demands and, in a sense, creates, just as Godard's La Chinoise craves and creates such an audience (if it doesn't find a crowd like that, it can make a crowd like that. That's what directors are doing as they slave over their editing desks, making audiences.) And, I'd argue, just as Die Hard 4 creates its own crowd with its own values.
But what inspired me so much about this film was the way it related to the immense sense of liberty you get when you're being creative, or just playing. First, I remembered how me and my brother used to turn down the sound on Cannon, the cop show, and do all the voices ourselves. We'd turn the plot from some morality play about order being restored and crime defeated into an absurd story about a white polar bear on the rampage. How we giggled! We even carried the dubbing through to the ads.
I'm getting exactly the same feeling writing my anti-bildungsroman (green-lighted last weekend in Paris by my publishers, La Volte, and scheduled for publication in September 2008). It's a feeling of personal freedom, sure, but also of social freedom. Because when you have someone else's story under your hands, and you soften it with water and throw it on the wheel and feel your power to remold it into any shape you like, you realize that society itself works the same way. We could find any shape we liked for society. We don't need to capitulate to someone else's boring story. Stories don't have to depict an implacable social order (the police, the law) returning things to "normal" after a temporary diversion by criminals. They can have other outcomes, outcomes which see "normal" society itself as deviant and yet utterly negotiable.
When you re-appropriate, when you detourne, you get the feeling that everything's up for grabs. With a little effort, a little substitution, the whole spectacle could go this way or that. Which will it be? It's up to you, to us. Everything social is still writeable, still fightable, still to live -- or die hard -- 4.
"Ah, perfect low fat entertainment!" I laughed. "Personally, though, I wouldn't even think of going to see that kind of American film." Somehow, I don't think I could escape being just a bit infected by the film's outlook, its view of human life, its value system, its editing style, whatever.
When I got home I loaded up the indispensable Ubu Web (who needs a video store nearby with Ubu Film online, and who has such a great and subversive video store in the hood anyway?) and watched a Situationist film by René Viénet, The Girls of Kamare (1974). Following up his 1973 détournement of a kung fu flick, Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, Viénet uses scenes from two Roman Porno films, Teruo Ishii’s Wild Woman Boss Story - Total Lynch (1973) and Norifumi Suzuki’s Horror High School Women - Violent Lynch Classroom (1973). Viénet adds some scenes of his own -- people fucking on top of books about China, mostly.
This movie immediately gave me a great sense of freedom and possibility. There was the sex and violence of the original, sure. That was all intact. There was the curatorial brilliance of getting to see a Norifumi Suzuki film from his most creative period in the mid-70s (the time of films like Hot Jump Mimizu Geisha, Tokugawa Sex Ban, School of the Holy Beast and Dolls of the Shogun's Harem). There was the underground energy of the zooms and edits, the fake blood and sperm, the Gainsbourg-like music on the soundtrack, the popping and scratching of the print. All these were pleasures.
But there was also a Brecht / Godard / Kathy Acker-like alienation thing going on -- these subtitles that turned the whole thing into a diatribe against the dissolution of revolutionary beauty. Sure, you could talk about Woody Allen's What's New Tiger Lily or Tarantino's Kill Bill, but those films entirely miss the political dimensions here, the sense of dangerous liberty and social critique. This stuff makes Tarantino look like the Antiques Roadshow. Sure, some of it -- the constant digs at Le Nouvel Observateur or the anarchists or Simone de Beauvoir -- is a bunch of obscure in-jokes for hip, embittered Parisian soixante-huitard revolutionaries. Sure, it's deliberately amateurish and silly and over the top. That's the point, and that's how the liberty gets generated.Hip embittered leftist purists at a (bicycle) drive-in is the audience this film demands and, in a sense, creates, just as Godard's La Chinoise craves and creates such an audience (if it doesn't find a crowd like that, it can make a crowd like that. That's what directors are doing as they slave over their editing desks, making audiences.) And, I'd argue, just as Die Hard 4 creates its own crowd with its own values.
But what inspired me so much about this film was the way it related to the immense sense of liberty you get when you're being creative, or just playing. First, I remembered how me and my brother used to turn down the sound on Cannon, the cop show, and do all the voices ourselves. We'd turn the plot from some morality play about order being restored and crime defeated into an absurd story about a white polar bear on the rampage. How we giggled! We even carried the dubbing through to the ads.I'm getting exactly the same feeling writing my anti-bildungsroman (green-lighted last weekend in Paris by my publishers, La Volte, and scheduled for publication in September 2008). It's a feeling of personal freedom, sure, but also of social freedom. Because when you have someone else's story under your hands, and you soften it with water and throw it on the wheel and feel your power to remold it into any shape you like, you realize that society itself works the same way. We could find any shape we liked for society. We don't need to capitulate to someone else's boring story. Stories don't have to depict an implacable social order (the police, the law) returning things to "normal" after a temporary diversion by criminals. They can have other outcomes, outcomes which see "normal" society itself as deviant and yet utterly negotiable.
When you re-appropriate, when you detourne, you get the feeling that everything's up for grabs. With a little effort, a little substitution, the whole spectacle could go this way or that. Which will it be? It's up to you, to us. Everything social is still writeable, still fightable, still to live -- or die hard -- 4.
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Date: 2007-07-11 02:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-11 02:16 pm (UTC)