[33] Why don't you write any more?

Sincerely flattered to hear the question a couple times. And the answer is I actually do, just not so much on this blog.
These days I tend to write on particular sites (e.g. letterboxd or goodreads) which people with a particular interest already visit. I do this mainly to avoid spending time trying to promote the blog.

Hope to see you out there,
F.

San Diego, California July 26, 2014

[32] Banning Bullfights

With the recent banning --and possible reopening-- of bullfights in
some parts of the world, a debate has been reheated with the usual
ingredients. To be fair this is a localized discussion: in the States, for
example, there is no heated debate. Around these parts we made our
mind about our moral superiority a long time ago and the spectrum of
socially acceptable reactions to anything involving animals getting
hurt is pretty well defined: shake your head, express disgust, and/or
feel outrage. Preferably over a burger.

But some echoes of the debate get here too, mainly via facebook. A
certain tedium escorts the old arguments as they pop up in the social
media, which is always ready to announce the discovery of warm
water. On one side bloody pictures go around accompanied by outraged
slogans "torture: niether art nor culture" is the cover page of
several awareness groups and something I remember hearing 20 years
ago. On the other hand, "provocative" public figures like Vargas Llosa
tell people that for centuries bullfights have been part of tradition
and other cultural figures greater than themselves loved bullfights
too. Hot water indeed, as if nobody had heard of PETA or Hemingway.

I'd like to discuss why I don't like bullfights but I don't want
anyone to think my opinion carries much moral weigth: I
consume more than a dozen animal species on my regular diet and I do
so for the taste of it. Pork, cow, chicken, salmon, octopus, and so on
are not a matter of sustenance. We kill and eat animals for our
tasting pleasure; this is the reality of meat consumption in the
industrialized world and no adult can argue ignorance of it. Moral
indignation from a person killing animals for pleasure can be hardly
taken seriously in this case.

Indeed, the fact that it looks like we're succeeding in globally
exporting our indignation for killing the pretty animals (dolphins,
whales, and bulls) while eating pork chops may be one of the hall of
fame achievements of cultural capitalism. But that's another story, my
objections here are aesthetic and cultural, or if you prefer, a matter
of sportsmanship.

Quite plainly the problem is the bull has little chance of seriously harming the
aptly named matador, and virtually no chance of killing him. There are
a few thousand corridas a year and the last great matador to die in
the bullring did so in the 80s. Meanwhile it is nearly a foregone
conclusion that the bull will be killed at the end.

Rooting for the hugely unfair favorite is the stuff of
cowards. Pretending that an unfair fight is even requires a lot of
suspension of disbelief. To chant "ole!" on a bullfight requires a mixture of
both. It is akin to that Doug Stanhope bit about somebody cheering for the
dealer at a blackjack table ("oh! 20! he bust your ass didn't he!
that's MY dealer!")

The story would be different if Man was the underdog species in the
fight: A man physically outmatched by a violent beast, steps
into the ring out of his own free will, with nothing but his skill and wits to
escape almost certain death, all in the name of sun-drenched glory. That's the
stuff ancient legends are made of and if such gladiators
existed today I would undestand the preservation of their cultural
legacy. Crazy courage has its value in our cultural aspirations.

The point that animal rights activist seem to miss is that such
fictions are necessary and people seeking them are not morally
deformed. We would be poorer if all our stories were about sharing and
fun, and we'd erase out our bloody heroes, and our taste for violence,
for metaphors of struggle and death and glory outwitting a larger
opponent. We need those, and people seeking them in the bullring are
not morally atrophied, they just need better fictions to go by.

The elephant in the room that the "cultural defense" can't admit is
that this particular format is terribly ineffective today: by our
standards a real-life bull pretty much guaranteeed to loose is a meek,
bad "monster," to send against a pack of people armed with all sorts
of advantages not the least of which is modern medicine. Tight pants and
bright colors ganging up against such an enemy don't live up to
the epic struggle of life and death they want to see or convince
others of seeing. Taking your suspension of disbelief that far, to the
point of self-deception is a bad cultural choice. Much like being a
twilight fan.

What we need is no more bullfights, but instead more copies of
Hemingway's Bullfighting epic Death in the afternoon.

--
Fabio Arciniegas A. , August 11, 2012 San Diego, CA

[31] The Infinity of (Movie) Lists

After reading the book "The Infinity of Lists," by Umberto Eco I've been giving some thought to the problem of Movies and Lists. I'm interested not just in a list of favorites, but instead in a special collection: a list of Movies made out of lists. Movies whose structure or content is essentially that of a list or a catalogue (e.g. Glitterati, or at least the 5 min version we see of it in Avery's rules of attraction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCvG1TCyikM)

The book was made in conjunction with an exhibit at the Louvre, organized by Eco himself, so The Infinity of Lists relies on literature and painting examples. This article presents, only as a modest game, film examples for each of the chapters of the book.

The Shield and it's Form v. the List and the Catalogue

The first two chapters of "The Infinity of Lists" set the stage for the examples and diversions to follow. Two examples from the Iliad illustrate corresponding and opposite modes of representation: First, when Hephaestus forges new arms for Achiles he includes a myriad of scenes from the earth, the sea, the sky, the sun, the moon, everyday life, and music into one and perfect, closed form. Achiles' shield is round, finite, and complete; the complexity of its content contained in harmonious unity.

Opposite to this closed form and unity is another example from the Iliad in which Homer attempts to convey the immensity of the Greek armada. Here no one metaphor comes to him, and instead he devotes the next three hundred or so verses to enumerating some of the ships and his captains. This is the list mode of representation. The catalogue.

To transpose the first mode into film, one could take Casablanca, for example. Casablanca is the ideally coherent narrative structure with an extraordinarly artificial and exhuberant content, but all within a preordained and contained system of representation. Even as events are hinted to exist before and after the movie, there is nothing relevant to Casablanca that is not contained within its classic beginning, middle and end.

On the other end there are the movies that occupy this article. Movies like 71 fragments of a Chronology of Chance by Michael Haneke. The problem portrayed -multiple lives in a modern city converging towards a catastrophic event- is far from a complete explanation, and the best Haneke (or anyone) can do is enumerate an incomplete list of vignettes that hints at the constituent elements.

Sometimes the elements of "list movies" are rendered together by narrative but often mostly by being part of the same list and explained only, if ever, by a critical and social narrative outside the work itself.

IMBD entry

The visual list

Film, like painting, is constrained by the frame. There are paintings and movies, however, that convey the idea that what we see in the frame is only a sample of a much larger group. What we see is followed by ellipsis. As Eco puts it, "not all but only an example of the totality whose number is hard to calculate, at least as much as Homer's warriors were."

The obvious examples here would be the hordes of CGI-produced armies on Lord of the rings, or the cocoons housing human batteries on The Matrix. But a more satisfying connection to painting can be made in Peter Greenaway's continuation of the dutch painting tradition of still lifes known as Vanitas.

Each Vanitas is an allusion to a wider list of delights. It mixes an abundance of disjointed perishables in one frame inviting us both to reflect on the range of hedonism and its transience. The marvelous filmed Vanitas of Peter Greenaway in movies like The Cook, the thief, his wife, and her lover are only the first example of why he is the prime list-making director.

The Ineffable

"Faced with something that is immensely large, or unknown, of which we still do not know enough or of which we shall never know, the author proposes a list as specimen, example, or indication, leaving the reader to imagine the rest"

As far as the topos of innefability goes the key movie examples are obvious and need no explanation: 2001: a space Oddyssey and Terrence Malick's The Tree of life.

Honorable mention should be made of Gaspar Noé and Enter the Void, which as flawed as it may be stands as one truly ambitious and original piece taking a stab at the visual representation of the ineffable.

List of things

The history of literature, Eco reminds us, is full of obsessive collections of objects. From the mundane contents of Bloom's kitchen board in Ulysses to Prospero's instruments. The allusion to Prospero should give a hint at the great list-maker, Greenaway, but I'll mention not his lists of wonders but two of his list-films based on everyday objects: Inside Rooms: 26 Bathrooms, London & Oxfordshire,1985 and The Tulse Luper's suitcases.

http://petergreenaway.org.uk/26bathrooms.htm

List of places

In a way many road movies could be counted as examples of movies dealing with lists of places. None more vertiginous and dense than Roger Avary's Glitterati, or at least the 5 min version we see of it in The Rules of Attraction:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCvG1TCyikM

There are lists and lists

In this chapter the distinction is drawn between the practical list and the poetical. The practical list has a referential function: like the grocery list, it only makes sense with respect to that which it signifies. The poetic list is enamoured with signifiers, it exists as a mantra, a lethany, that makes sense only in the aesthetic pleasure of putting the words (or images as the case might be) together in the order prescribed by the list.

Admittedly, movies in this category are the most abstract. This is a necessity as we are talking of movies joining frames not by narrative cohesion but simply by the beauty of putting one image after the next. At its most ethereal, the poetic list finds place in Stan Brakhage's short films, of which Glaze of Cathexis is a fine example.

Less abstract samples of sequential images forming poetic lists include Sergei Parajanov's The Colour of Pomegranates and wonderful sequences by the greatest poet film has produced: Andrei Tarkovsky, particularly in the meditative Andrei Rublev or the slow still water tracking shots of Stalker.

Exchanges Between List and Form

Instead of a movie made out of lists, in this category we are looking for a movie given form by being a list. Bear in mind, it is not sufficient to have multiple parts, in this case at best we have a single unity of story split between chapters and at worse a list of disjointed movies glued together by external branding. No, we are looking for a work that makes sense only inasmuch as being formed by a list of movies.

Such work is Kieslowsky's The Decalogue. The Decalogue is made out of ten movies, each dealing with a commandment, and while individual movies make sense (as the apple in Arcimboldo's Spring makes sense alone pictorially) the work in total is only rendered form only as a list of the ten elements.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092337/

The rethoric of enumeration

In the chapter "the rethoric of enumeration," Eco gives a delightful breakdown on the different devices for enunciating accumulations, particularly anaphora, asyndeton, polysyndeton (lists repeating the same word at the beginning of each phrase, lists with no conjunctions linking them, and lists with conjunctions, respectively).

I admit this article hits a limit in this topic. One could make a parallel between different types of cuts and transition techniques in movies (jump cuts, fades, lists with voice overs and without, etc) but I fear this is either too specific or too forced of an analogy.

Lists of mirabilia

The list of marvels serves the double medieval function of listing wonders, which often we know not to exist, and presuming a form, an order, belying the list.

A nice example of lists of mirabilia I can recall is from an endearing clay animation called Mary and Max where lists of small mirabilia owned by each party are listed and shown sequentially over many exchanges from afar.

Collections and treasures

The voracious appetite for accumulation has one definitive reference in cinema: Xanadu.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=qY-eqnw_DXE#t=17s

The Wunderkammer

The cabinets of wonders, those rooms filled with rarities and monstrosities prefiguring our natural science museums can be found in Greenaway movies like a Zed and two Noughts and even as sets for whole pieces such as Mark Romanek's Closer music video for Nine Inch Nails.

The challenge of finding a movie that is a Wunderkammer in itself, is only satisfied by one film to my knowledge: Historia Naturaeby the great Jan Svankmajer, best known for his mixtures of live action and stop motion animation like Alice and Faust, delightful rarities in themselves.

List of properties, List by essence, The aristotelian telescope

It is the goal of science and abstraction to understand the world by it's essence, Eco explains, and thus a purely scientific description of a tiger would set the tiger somewhere in a tree of genus, species, etc. Meanwhile, it is the goal of description and analysis to break down every possible accident and mention that a tiger called Shere Khan was Mougli's enemy in The Jungle Book.

The first, tree-like sort of knowledge sacrifices detail for the sake of clarity, while the latter, a rhizome (or fully connected graph, if you prefer the computer science term to Deleuze's poetic analogy of entangled underground roots) sacrifices clarity for the sake of connection and extensibility.

It is proper of a primitive culture that still has to construct a hierarchy to use the list by properties, instead of essence. It is also proper of a very mature culture (as eco says, maybe one in crisis) to use a list by properties, because it casts doubt on all previous definitions. Both the Medieval and Postmodern mind gravitate toward the rhizome, and thus the list by properties.

Films that are representations of properties, hinting at a hidden/underlying encyclopedia of meaning and metaphor are not very popular (and often not very good movies either, despite what Jodorowsky fans say) but there are some truly genuine jewels that fit the bill. The open and list-like exploration of encounters and properties of the race and guilt problem in Michael Haneke's Caché is one of them.

Excess, from Rabelais onwards

This type of list is excessive not just out of necessity given the number of things referred, but excessive in it's labyrinthic love of itself and its artifice. One extraordinary example suffices: The Draughtsman's contract, by Peter Greenaway.

Coherent Excess

Out of excessive lists, two trends rise in the post-modernity of

lists. The first is the coherent excess that deforms but stills refers to some underlying order. The purest example is The Alphabet, by David Lynch (warning: this can be a disturbing piece, play at your own risk)

Chaotic Enumeration

The second trend in the contemporary excessive list is the chaotic enumeration. Lists in this category are not necessarily long. Brakhage would be often a good example, but to provide a counterpart to the dark previous example, I suggest here Begotten by E. Elias Merhige.

Begotten is a great film, but it's truly hard to watch. Perhaps the most visceral piece of legitimate cinema I've encountered and it could be argued that it does have a certain metaphorical plot, but a full viewing should make it obvious why is included in the realm of the chaotic. (warning: this is definitely a disturbing piece, don't trust the trailer's promise of balance)

Mass-media lists

The mechanics of lists find their place in mass media as well but there

they serve a more basic role. They are in place just to remind us of abundance. This is common enough in musicals that Eco himself draws his examples from the genre for this chapter: Bathing beauty by Minelli and Footlight parade by Lloyd Bacon, only two of many examples of numerous repetitions of essentially the same showgirl repeated over and over.A simple music video by Nikki Minaj where you have eight or nine indistinguishable dancers (both from each other and from the main performer) would suffice, but in order to keep the examples interesting here is a more cinematic choice: Citta de la Donne by Fellini. Definitely not his best film, but one where the artifice of the mass-media list (that is, the all-you-can-eat buffet) is put to a use other than the typical musical number.

List of vertigos

Lists of vertigos imply containers for infinite lists or describe mechanisms to generate them. Examples include Borges' library containing all the books that can be written with 26 symbols.

Lists of vertigos present a problem for our exercise. Literature can only define the list, and leave the vertigo to take hold of the reader as the implication of the definition sinks in. Films show things, they enumerate them explicitly.

There is no film, in the strict sense, that can directly show the vertigo of infinite or truly huge lists. Of course it is conceivable to make a "film" that shows say, the decimal points of Pi as it is being calculated by a computer on the background, or a "film" made of 26 shorts that keep being shown randomly one after the other. However, unless you are willing to consider such exercises cinema, we hit here a limit of the medium.

Attempts at combinatorials have been tried in experimental cinema, both arthouse and commercial (e.g. the point and choose HBO Voyeur http://archive.bigspaceship.com/hbovoyeur/) but until we are ready to declare cinema dead (or at least limited the way we have declared photography and painting before it) and explore image in ways other than the passive sequentially of film, the list of vertigos will remain out of reach.

Exchanges between practical and poetic lists

Sometimes practical lists become a thing of poetry and poetic lists serve a referential or practical purpose beyond them. Such exchanges can be found in cinema too. One tremendous example is M is for Man, Music, Mozart:

A non-normal list

If the list of vertigos takes us to the edge of the capacity for the medium, the non-normal list puts us beyond it. And beyond the reason of lists themselves.

What a non-normal lists asks from us is a paradox familiar to readers who have studied set theory: Consider the list of all list that are not members of themselves.

If the list itself is not member, then it should be included on our list. But only things that are not members of themselves should be in it(!).

This paradox, formulated by Russell, opens a can of worms far beyond this article (and beyond Eco's book). If you have not seen this paradox before, and your mind is not blown away yet, I suggest you read the definition on The Infinity of lists rather than the wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_paradox) .

As for our game, this chapter puts the nail in the coffin: There isn't a film that is a non-normal list.

--

Fabio Arciniegas A., San Diego CA, November 25, 2011