o'er 'n' about

Just read about the great Disney rotoscoping scandal, which reminded me of (the also-rotoscoped) Waltz with Bashir. As with the g.d.r.s. - which people've carped has marred & bespoiled their childhoods etc. - rotoscoping in Bashir functions to suggest the difficulty of identifying w/ alien people, eras and experiences (including one's own past). Layering, overwriting and filtering, which techniques I've incidentally been lately mucking about with as I teach myself Photoshop, constitute both Bashir's subject (it's about protagonist/director Ari Folman's attempt to recover his own psychically-suppressed wartime biography) and its methodology. Besides metaphorising the soldiers' modes of parsing the horrible stuff they have to see & perpetrate, the overlaid animation stops the representation of war being too pornographically grimy or schmaltzily exploitative. Right at the end Folman deploys a couple of minutes of archive footage, footage which he's both 'earned' the right to use and schooled the viewer to (better) understand over the course of the movie.

The film capitalises on the uncanniness and increased ambiguity of rotoscoped faces. The way interviewees move, fidget, unconsciously itch their noses etc. makes it clear they're real, but the rotoscoping frustrates the viewer's impulse to look for evidence of what being in a war does to someone on their face or in their eyes. Freud (L. Freud, that is) has talked about the necessity - when painting nudes - of treating the head as another limb, Deleuze of the difference between head and face, & these nearly-faces blur that line, showing that while cartoons tend to be unambiguously hyper-expressive, they can also be eerily inscrutable. Obvs this is especially true of comic books, what w/ their being static & mute. Having recently done my culturally mandated reading of Watchmen and checked out From Hell too I'm suitably wowed by how Moore and his collaborators exploit comics' formal features to whodunnit &/or whydunnit ends.

Still haven't managed to see the celluloid Watchmen. Maybe what I'm most curious about is if/how it'll handle the bit where they relate Dr. Manhattan's biography after he decamps to Mars . The fact the narrative's related via still images distributed on a page is exploited to super-dazzling effect in this issue. Dr. Manhattan's an erstwhile mild-mannered physicist who, due to the drastically nuclear complications of an experiment, exists in a privileged relation to space, time and matter (past/present/future an open book, teleportation & the manipulation of reality's constituent atoms no problem etc.). The character's reminiscing, in part on account of a polaroid he's found, and the reader's meanwhile being filled in on his backstory, laid out in achronologically sequenced panels between which dense & various relations of causality and coincedence obtain (the book's very much about humanity's pattern-recognition/-formation capacities & their potential to redeem or damn us - hence Rorschach*). The visual rhymes, echoes, ironies etc. would survive the transition to cinema, but suspending stills against a white page's vacuum turns out to be such an effective way of conveying outer space's inert airlessness, the character's scrambled temporality & the fact that Merleau-Ponty's contention that

'the multiplicity of points or 'heres' can in the nature of things be constituted only by a chain of experiences in which on each occasion one and no more of them is presented as an object, & which itself is built up in the heart of this space. And, finally, far from my body's being for me no more than a fragment of space, there would be no space at all for me if I had no body'

doesn't hold as true as it ought for him that I can't really imagine a movie treatment matching up...

(vulpine nuptials from here, pensive Folman here, pensive blue nudity here)

*sort of also what this blog's about; the pretty much all-surpassing and occasionally pernicious pleasure I acquire from tracing/recognising/asserting however-arbitrary linkages and associations between things

Vermoulu

Just read, via Steve Baker's The Postmodern Animal, about Helen Mayer Harrison and John Harrison's project Casting a Green Net: Can It Be We Are Seeing a Dragon? which saw the two artists delimiting an area of the Pennines bounded by the Humber, the Mersey and misc. Roman roads in order to consider cultural and ecological interlinkages within it. Only when they'd set these bounds did they find they'd outlined a dragon. Wilfuly hallucinated out of OS maps, the Harrisons' dragon - with its two marigold wings and beaked profile - is illustrated above, as are a couple  of AGF's even more Rorschach-y blot-dragons. It's kind of like the woman-shaped map in Rider Haggard's She (with regard to which, transposed into a chic Gallic electro register, this too).

Dragons, as the mapping of one onto (or maybs the discovery of one within) the Pennines suggests, are instruments of territorialization and deterritorialization. Always occupying as-yet unmapped frontiers  (hence 'here be dragons' plus also 'It Came from Outer Space') they embody the negotiation of borders - between places, between species, between the real and imaginary. AGF's Dancefloor Drachen - the LP which the inkblot dragons were produced to illustrate - is about digital property, about modes of acquiring and altering others' music in an age when bricks&mortar pressing plants & record shops are increasingly superfluous, and is as such preoccupied with shifting boundaries. 

As with giants and Krakens, dragons speak to a kind of animistic need to imagine animals on the same scale as the landscape, who are or at least are able to shape that landscape, animals the forms of which are suggested in rockfaces and bunched clouds - hence the Rorschachiness of AGF's and the Harrisons' dragons.  Also pictured above is a plastic dragon-islet playset which I owned as a kid that opened up and had a smaller dragon in it. Pictured too is Shadow of the Colossus, a recent, deeply melancholy videogame where you kill 16 behemoths that turn, dead, to piles of mossy rubble which look from the right angle like like the monsters they used to be pre-ossification. The game takes some design cues* from the earlier Panzer Dragoon Saga, wherein you rode a dragon over ruins and deserts. One of the interesting things in Panzer was the dragon's malleability; there's three images above of the screen where you moved a cursor between 4 points in order to genetically reconfigure your mount in real-time. Aspects of the dragon would evoke a rhino, a narwhal, a cricket, a gecko, an egrit without its ever looking entirely like any of them, or even like a straightforward chimera-like composite. 

Reading Baker grapple with Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'becoming-animal'  - which has to do with creating new, contingent combinations of attributes, with multiplicity and metamorphosis, 'deterritorialization' and the liquidation of known boundaries -  reminded me of this facet of the game. Becoming, in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense, is not a matter of A turning into B or A + B turning into C but of perpetual, indefinable flux (nothing is and nothing becomes; everything is becoming) and  'becoming-dragon' is no more or less viable than 'becoming-antelope.'  As often w/ Deleuze, its an attractive idea insofar as it gets close to something of the way I find I think or intake stuff. I spent the lengthy tail-end of a recent party propped up frazzledly watching maybe 4 hours worth of Planet Earth, hours which are only now imperfectly recoverable - so that while there's odd gestures or textures or images that've stayed with me I can't, for example, say just what species the animal that tore out a long, red shoehorn of inner neck from another animal on a pebbled, spumy shore was - I've just a sense of scattering, slickness and blubber, mingled somehow w/ tactile data from the bubblewrap on the fancy-dress costume of the girl sat next me. The emotional residue smacks a bit of being a kid, back when it was okay to imagine or credulously read about or draw up dragons.

 

 

*not to mention its mood (which is that sort of bereft, coastally-salty bleakness you get in Old English poetry) plus a taste for portentous Engrish titles

(AGF's dragons from her website, poemproducer, worth-seeing-in-motion dragon morphing from this vid, Dune-y colossus from here, OS map dragon from Steve Baker's The Postmodern Animal, dragon islet from here)

Implicit/Allusive Spoilers OR 'like wet gloves they bobbed and shone til he sluiced/ Them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead'

Firstly, it's conceivable that Bale's intentionally channeling a certain puppyfat-prone midfield ace in The Prestige right? With his inanely boyish grin and estuary vowels? The movie deployed pretty much every key fin de siecle gothic trope (live burial, orientalism, dopplegangers, fragmentary journals, science and/science as magic, the gaslit pursuit of incognito gentlemen by incognito gentlemen over Eastcheap cobbles*) but in a deft and intelligent way. Its spin on the gothic idea of the selves we're obligated to murder in order to attain the condition of civilization (the actual unattainability of which ideal means the murder has to daily re-occur) was pretty chilling/affecting/effective, and as evocative of the 1970s/80s sci/bio-fi gothic of  Alien, The Thing or Bladerunner as it was Jekyll, Dorian or Dracula (it's a movie almost as preoccupied w/ parthenogenesis as Alien 4). Even ScarJo's bungled UK English isn't that excruciating.

The sense you're left with of lives stunted or wasted, of selves expensively, performatively dissembled, made me think of Judith Butler's notion of 'heterosexual melancholy' - straight culture's disavowed sorrow over the people we're required not to be &/or love. On another tack, kinda weird that Hugh Jackman's dandified stage-magician turn might have inspired this year's bizarre, razzledazzle-y Oscars format tho isn't it?

*Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's argued that a 'tableau of two men chasing one another across a landscape' is central to Frankenstein in particular and Victorian gothic in general. Pretty much The Thing's entire cocktail of bromantically tinged & paranoiac macho rivalry, icy climes, monstrosity and science is cribbed directly from Shelley.

(Kurt, hirsute and investigating, is from here, Lampsesque bale here, Frankencrevasse here, Frankenhug (w/ Drogba) here)