The Girls of Kamare: not Die Hard 4

[imomus]

I 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.

Comments

[ashleyandel.livejournal.com]

I had the chance to see "Live Free or Die Hard" with my friend Anthony tonight. We always go to movies that are destined for our idiotic and directed laughter like this or "Bobby" (Lindsay Lohan amongst a Woody Allen like 'epic' actor roster), but we went and saw "Ratatouille", the new Disney-Pixar film instead. It was chock full of "Amelie"-like hues and stereotypical Parisian sentiment dreck, but it focused on the culinary arts as a focal point, which I love--and the master chef is a rat. A cute kids film, but probably washed up on your beach along with Sofia Coppola and any Hollywoodish outreach to the "obscure"...It's good to encourage kids or their parents to cook.

Live Free or Die Hard. It appeals to me because it sounds so foolishly conservative! And Bruce Willis apparently doesn't yell "yippy ky-yo-tie-yay, motherfucker" this time 'round. He simply yells "yippy-ky-yo-tie-yay". Brilliant.



a'a

[fugitivemotel.livejournal.com]

Those films you mention are all very well, but do they feature a scene where somebody fires a car at a helicopter? No. And THAT is why I will be going to see Die Hard 4 tonight; for its pure, violent, ridiculous, fantastical escapism.

[akabe.livejournal.com]

there's always the thinking person's die-hard

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Is that you back in your GInza pad, fixing the wifi, Alin?

[akabe.livejournal.com]

yeah, next time you stay here, what? you'll send me bloody whaling or something.

[akabe.livejournal.com]

btw, thanks for moving the fridge near the window. often thought of doing it but never did. we now have space in the middle.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

Flux Film's "Nam June Paik - Zen For Film" (http://www.ubu.com/film/fluxfilm.html) is interesting. It's just a film featuring a white square on a black background and nothing else. At first, you find yourself waiting for something; usually when you watch a film the images are the focus and they indicate the passing of time. However, when a movie is striped of nearly all content, you find yourself noticing the defects/noise that you usually block out, and you start to treat it as the indicator of passing time the content would be. This film was made in the 60's however, they had no control over the defects, so I wonder if that's what the makers intended... I'm sure that now they could create a film with absolutely no noise.

Do you ever enjoy mainstream entertainment, Nick? Does everything you enjoy have to be on the fringe?

[xishimarux.livejournal.com]

"Transformers" is where I was at last week along with "Ratatouille". I'm a total sucker for animated films, digital or non digital. With the exception of crap like those awful penguin, Shriek and stupid animals on some quest to get something movies. TERRIBLE. The food critique in Ratatouille reminds me of you Momus.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Action film




Horror genre:




Erotica:

[raspberry-lemon.livejournal.com]

♥

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

oo that moving camera time lapse is a neat trick!!!

they don't teach you that at school...

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

Odd. When I was kid me and some fellow weirdos used to soup up the TV to our hifis and listen to Cannon in simulated stereo. We would then play it back editing out the dialogue in order to have those funky Universal? licks a la Schifrin.
I Wish I had kept them, that stuff has never been released.
Sometimes the dialogue itself would come in handy in odd snippets for our cut up radio station. Jingles made from flushing toilets. It was all about fantasising that we were something, like a radio station or part of the Python crew - and we were.

We also took bets on how much Cannon's automobile would sway when he got in it. The whole room would be shouting. "Frank! Don't get in the car!"

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think I liked "Butch Cassidy and the Sunshine Kid", the one with Redford and Newman (I'm sure they've done a remake with Nicholas Cage and Nicholas Cage since then)...

[violet-hemlock.livejournal.com]

I just dont say this enough,...not like you need to hear it again and again....But, you are awesome. Everything social is still writeable. YESYES...And I did the same thing, only with Hawaii 5-O.

[peacelovgranola.livejournal.com]

americans (and apparently the Dutch? lol) love to fill their minds
with this kind of violent "entertainment"--violence porn.

the violence freaks usually try to explain it away as harmless...
it's not harmless...there are consequences to what we fill our
minds with, however subtle...for example, i suffered through a
sandra bullock film a few days ago on a plane, and i'm still
exhibiting symptoms, craving schmaltzy b-films, etc.

bruce willis is a long time contributor to the republican party,
and he can fuck off with his macho smirking and his john wayne
bullshit. "real men" don't solve problems with violence, knuckle
walking primates do (and i guess conservatives with pronounced
male pattern baldness).

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

Go see Transformers! (I havent seen it but the idea of you watching it in the cinema is humorous)

Oh, and you should check out Toshio Matsumoto on UBUWEB (he did Funeral Parade of Roses) Atman and The Song of Stone are both excellent.

[(Anonymous)]

"americans" "the dutch" please!

[peacelovgranola.livejournal.com]

yes, "americans." you know, the ones who flock (sheeple?) in millions to see blockbuster shit movies. those americans.

"the dutch" comment was a joke reference to A&C, Arling and Cameron, the group Momus was talking about, who told him they had gone to see the Die Hard-on 4 film. (It's not, um, funny when you have to explain it).

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Momus,
Did you ever review Drawing Restraint 9?
(I like movie reviews)

-Marc.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Spare me. One of the oldest cliches I hear from friends who have studied in Europe is that their Euro roommates without fail will complain about US imperialism, then eagerly gobble up the absolute dreck of American pop culture--bad movies, bad music, bad food, bad denim--stuff most of my friends and I would never dream of acknowledging. I also recall on more than one occasion having to walk across the street in order to pass a mobbed Parisian cinema brimming with American movies. Likewise London.

The whole "American culture being shoved down our throats" clause is such an unconvincing cop-out; you've no one to blame but yourselves for its prevalence. If you don't want it, then don't patronize the stuff. A sizable portion of Americans don't.

[peacelovgranola.livejournal.com]

spare me the anecdotal "my friends told me" routine. i'm clearly aware of how europeans eat up the shit culture america produces, while still putting on airs of superiority otherwise.

and you're right: most of the shit america produces in terms of culture i can, and do, live without, as well. i don't have myself to blame, because i don't consume it; i'm merely commenting on the millions of philistines who do...

(i'm not quite sure what you're quibbling about here, but my original comment was simply that millions of americans flock to Die Hard-on type shit films and obviously love gratuitous violence--as do at least 2 dutch people, apparently. that last part was merely my being silly--a failed attempt, granted. if i gave the impression that only americans, and not europeans, go for this shit, i do apologize).

and, of course, nowhere did i claim that it's (american culture) being "shoved down" anyone's throats...honestly baffled by that bit of hyperbole...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I both previewed (http://imomus.livejournal.com/114578.html) and reviewed (http://imomus.livejournal.com/184611.html) it (for the review you have to check the comments below the second preview).

[dailyrave.livejournal.com]

Last night I watched the new Andy Warhol documentary that they posted, as well as the bit about the Taj Mahal Travelers, in spite of the language barrier (if only I could understand Japanese!)
I found the Warhol piece especially inspiring, reminding me that American culture isn't completely shit culture (or at least it wasn't at some point).

Also- I love Arling and Cameron! I've been big fans of theirs since I was 13, gleefully flitting about on Napster and discovering "electronica" for the first time.

[ishinagami.livejournal.com]

I beleave all cultures have tons of crap in them its just when you get stuff from another culture its generally filtered. Where as with us Americans its everything that gets sent out everywhere.

Then again i'm of the camp that cinama is dead because of the old fogies that run it with their culture and values that are a good 50 years old. Its a shame more underground stuff doesn't get out in wide international release.

Want to take over the world, get it to see your movie.