LoveYes! III - A Rough Cut

Fundamental to cinema was its exquisite representation of the multifarious and expanding relationships between ‘containers’ rendered as fixed and discrete by a human and cultural consciousness corralled into this a persuasion by a combination of hegemonic markets and and a falling back upon base instincts due to survival sickness. Analogous to such containers are the frames upon a piece of film or within a videogram. At its core the moving image captured by a camera is one photograph after another registered on a strip of film as separate frames. Yet by arranging these individually frozen moments into a sequence, moving them from one to another, we create not only movement but with movement we make all manner of connections, whether emotional, philosophical or scientific (concepts ad infinitum) between frames and ‘limitless’ data within the frames. 1+1 = 3 (or 4 or 1,000,000!).

Film criticism has often and rather simplistically, opposed the ‘plenitude’ of the image to the ‘cut’ of the edit in terms of ‘a little death’. However by focussing instead on the essence of cinema, its bringing of motion to the photographic, the violent separation becomes instead a loving embrace between movements, moments of communication. The further this connection is stretched (yet maintained) the greater the tension. The energy imbued within this elastic relationship is invested by the ‘authors’ of these movements; in industrial terms both those who were part of the production and the ‘consumer’. However rather than passively receiving, the ‘spectator’ can be actively constructing meaning and investing desires (authoring) while almost fully immersed in the data field created. The art therefore is to maximise the investment of energy between these ‘containers’ (frame, thought, idea, gesture, spectator, bit, beat, user, whatever (although I find ‘figure’ an eloquent encapsulation of the many inadequate distinctions)). Brecht might have called such a process distanciation but currently within the LoveYes! paradigm it is conceived as much as a channel or shifting data stream than as a process. I have referred to this more recently as the ‘libidinal bandwidth’.

From this perspective it soon becomes apparent that montage is a motor that although most fundamental to (and eloquently brought to the surface by) cinema, it is itself a force that extends and expands far beyond this media into every corner of human perception. It is no surprise then that this conception of film editing, discovered perhaps by the Soviet film-maker Dziga-Vertov was reconfigured by the Dziga-Vertov group of late 60’s France as ‘Montage at all levels of production”

Due in no small amount to the current availability and affordability of certain types of production capital our current major tool should be music (see the glut of entries to this blog by one Mr. Bob Swans). If we are to gouge, with any success, cupid’s arrowhead out from the body politic under dissection, then perhaps it is best returning to our mainline cultural concern.

I never really liked the Manic Street Preachers.

I liked them even less without their original spit-ritual force and songwriter. They seem to define at least one aspect of yesterday’s null state (a)git-pop (where guitars Blair and hands wring out in a muted apology by the citizens of Jericho to the chaos outside). These monsters stalk a suburban De Chirico/Lowry world, microbes evaporating from a plastic reality in every and no direction on a scientifically austere canvas, under a looking glass left vacant. Chill ceramics, organic food fayres encased in vacuum-formed polymers, lined by Mondeo and Celica). A series of empty gestures, middle managers in guerrilla-garb, youth make-up & rock-out pose to hide the fact that underneath the onion skin of image, meaning and identity they are devising still more ingenious ways to talk knots around the issue before dumping it in the canal, avoiding forever addressing the problem without appearing to jump ship like rats. The process makes thick, glossy, smooth and increasingly impenetrable the epidermis of the ‘political’ class. We simply slide off the silicone finish, no closer to the buds and bellows of our desire. The Harvest for the World was always just a seed toss. Political pornography.

More subtle and complex contributions to the Spectacular Dance of the Liberals (sold out I’m afraid) are perhaps those entrances made by U2 and now even Radiohead. Yet to be quite even-handed their spectacular anality and grandiose cultural impact deserves a more joyous shotgun autopsy.

But rather than embark on endeavours similarly frigid to our death watches, by talking any further about what we are about and about to do (surely it is more exciting to be sluiced through by s-lang pumped with run-on syntax errors and be truly a bout de soufflé!) I would like to now conclude this opening Attunement (a method I believe necessary due to what is currently a crisis of faith in our cultures) and direct you to the Acclesia of conceptual elements and concrete figures (and whatever other object or container comes to hand and can be thrown about) we hope to now concieve with every yard of flesh we can offer and to our last contracted, prolapsed gasp.