"Oolong the Rabbit's last performance." (2003).*

(image source).

Of course I clicked on it. It’s a rabbit with a waffle on its head. Wouldn’t you?

It took me to a Wikipedia page, whereupon I discovered that this is Oolong the Rabbit. Little Oolong gained Internet fame when his owner began posting pictures online of Oolong with things on his head. Naturally, it wasn’t long before controversy brewed, with many accusing Oolong’s master of cruelty, to which he replied:

This was never my intention when I included numerous links to photographs, showing Oolong’s unique ability to hold objects on his head. This is not a site to mock rabbits, or demonstrate animal abuse.

Despite these setbacks, Oolong had a long and happy career, with many hundreds of “photo journeys” being posted in his eight years of life. Oolong passed away on 7 January 2003.

Presumably his death wasn’t waffle-related.

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* – I’m not trying to give the photo a post-modern wanky art title. THAT’s the title. Click the source link if you don’t believe me.

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Now you too, can shake with me.

Until next time…

They look and dress the same, both subverting social norms with their op-shop outfits and casual attitude towards facial hair and general grooming.

They both discuss politics, the environment, philosophy, art…

They both have a tattered copy of Camus hanging out of the pocket of their grungy, hip, fitted jeans.

The difference lies with Camus. The bohemian’s actually read it.

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- Oscar Wilde

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Suffice to say, it’s interesting reading Virilio and having the new NK leader have his spiel at the same time. I’ve just finished reading Virilio’s thoughts on the Nazi propaganda machine, and there are a great deal of similarities between it and what I’m certain must be in operation in NK.

He speaks of Hitler seeking out people ‘who could make the German people a mass of common visionaries “obeying a law they did not even know but which they could recite in their dreams”‘ and that while ‘[o]thers would make war to win… the German nation and its masters already moved in a world “where nothing has any meaning, neither good nor evil, neither time nor space, and where what other men call success can no longer serve as a criterion” (Goebbels).’

He writes later of the denazification in late 1945, when many key figures in the administration spoke of waking up, as though released from a spell. One wonders if that will ever happen in NK.

The other thing that grabbed my attention in light of the latest news from NK was Virilio’s relaying Hitler’s thoughts on the rocket programme. On viewing footage of the successful launch of the A4 in 1943, Hitler is quoted as saying:

‘If we’d had these rockets in 1939 we’d never have had this war.’

This from the mouth of Adolf Hitler: the same principles of deterrence held sway over US foreign policy for the next thirty years.

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Not sure what it is about these things: probably that they’ve just given me a broader understanding of how cinema works, how diverse an artform it is, and how diverse the approaches to it can be.

Last Year in Marienbad is a film directed by Alan Resnais, that was released in 1961. To say it’s an art piece is something of an understatement. It is singularly responsible for splitting the critical and academic communities in half – on one side are those calling it a cinematic, artistic, and cultural revolution; on the other, the utterly baffled. Long story short (or short story short, depending on how you look at it), Marienbad is about a couple in love. Or at least, they were in love. Well, they were, if you believe him. She’s not so sure. Cue a lot of rumination, repetition, circular narratives, long tracking shots down hallways, random characters, a game of skill that the one guy always wins, death (maybe), murder (maybe), rape (maybe). It’s all a bit up in the air. In the end the guy gets the girl but the audience still doesn’t know if anything actually happened last year. Or even if the events depicted in the movie actually happened. It’s a cineaste’s dream, in more ways than one.

Ling’s talk discussed Marienbad in terms of the work of French philosopher Alain Badiou, whose work has only recently been translated into English. He contested that Marienbad can be thought of – at least in Badiou’s philosophy – as the quintessential ‘amorous event’. The ‘event’ is a critical element of Badiou’s worldview: he sees it as an unpredictable rupture in the order of things; the order he calls the ‘situation’. A Badiouian ‘event’ is fleeting, often patched up by the order, the state, the situation, very soon after their occurrence. In order for an event to have existed, it must be ratified by an outside observer. How many countless thousands of ‘events’ must occur, in this case, and go unheard? It’s a tree falling in the forest kind of scenario. For Marienbad, though, it opens some incredible narrative possibilities. Did X and A meet last year? Did X rape A? Did M kill X or A?

The events in the film are never confirmed or denied by anyone; nor are they confirmed or denied as a metaphor or allegory for anything else. In a sense, Resnais leaves it to the viewer to decide what to make of it. And that’s the real hook of Marienbad – for spectator theory, it’s a boon and a watershed. For fans of linear narrative, it’s a bullet to the brain. To me, it’s just a beautiful film.

Virilio’s book War and Cinema was recommended to me by one of my supervisors way back at the start of my candidature, and apart from reading a few pages here and there, it’s only now that I’ve sat down and really sunk my teeth into it. It has little direct relevance to my research; nothing immediately jumps out as being quotable or workable into my arguments. However, the work is exquisite, and has informed my understanding of the intricacies of war and cinema – and the links and parallels between the two – beyond measure. At a pinch, Virilio draws together nuclear deterrence, mutually assured destruction and game theory, with ancient Egyptian ideas of existence and the afterlife, then jumps to the establishment and downfall of the picture palaces of the early twentieth century, before heading over to spiritualism and photography.

Virilio frames cinema not as an analogue of reality – as it often is – but as a military-industrial construct, not as Der Derian would have it, but as a means of penetrating the newly three-dimensional, global battlefield. He does this via a discussion of everything above, and it is a marvellous and, occasionally, amusing read.

It will be good to try Deleuze again after this, as Virilio simplifies the notion of the movement-image and makes it very accessible.

So there it is… revelations in my cinema-mind… filmind (a la Frampton)… whatever. It’s all still mush as far as how I finish this damn thesis by March next year. Eek.

Until next time…

‘Those who have since attempted some new explorations move mostly through postmodern territory where film became less a means of exploring the self and the world and the means of expressing both than of deflating them with images that either lack self-consciousness or mock it by turning inquiry into a sometimes indiscriminate embrace of pop-cultural images.’

Robert Kolker, in the new 2011 version of A Cinema of Loneliness, discussing the current cinematic ‘turn’. I adore this quote. I may fashion from it a t-shirt to be worn with hipster-esque irony.

Until next time…