punk - communal living - 2005 - Mouth to Mouth

Mouth to Mouth
Alison Murray
2005
M2M Films
101 minutes

Mouth to Mouth is a film about a group of street kids travelling through Europe in a rusty old van, attending festivals, dumpster diving, and smoking and drinking. The group, called Street People Armed with Radical Knowledge, or SPARK, goes from city to city living as crusty punks, forming social bonds and drifting around until they make their way to a vineyard somewhere in southern Europe. At this point the group began living communally and working the land while they also take on the form of the charismatic cult that was hinted at during their earlier travels.

The group has a leader, Harry, who expresses a bland self-help straight-edge philosophy and repeatedly admonishes his followers to "stay strong". At one point, while the group is on the road, their youngest member cuts his throat on a piece of twisted metal and dies after he's flung into a dumpster to look for food. No one really takes responsibility for the death, including the boy's best friend who carelessly tossed him in there, but its Harry's disinterest that is striking as an early clue of his evil. Once they occupy the vineyard, Harry begins exercising authority more cruelly, punishing disobedient followers by putting them in a well. The film ends predictably when one member dies under such punishment and another, Sherry (the film's main character - it doesn't really suit the purpose of my blog to speak about her) rejects Jeff's authority and leaves the group.

The group is a charismatic cult with a complete absence of spirituality, much like the cult in Martha Marcy May Marlene. They are a self-help group with a bad man for a leader. Much like with that other movie, its easier for me to understand how the bizarre and psychotic millenarianism of Charles Manson, for example, could compel followers to invest in him as an authority figure, than it is for me to understand how a bland punk-guru's dull can inspire his friends to obey his every word.

Director Allison Murray also made the documentary Train on the Brain, the greatest of all hobo/train hopping films, so that's good.

The Bug is on the soundtrack, which is also very good.

avant-garde - book - 1985 - The Dada & Surrealist Word Image

The Dada & Surrealist Word Image
Judi Freedman & John C. Welchman
The MIT Press
1989
141 pages

The Dada & Surrealist Word Image is a hardcover catalogue for a travelling exhibition of Dada and Surrealist works of art.  The exhibition’s first location was the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where it was shown from June 15-August 27, 1989 before being transported to other locations around the United States and Europe.  

I think that the title of the catalogue makes its content, and the theme of the exhibition, quite clear.  Play with language featured prominently in the programs of the Dada and Surrealist movements who sought to unlock the liberatory potential of nonsense and incongruity in written and visual creative work.  The Dadaists focus on language is driven by a desire for nonsense and a will to break down the structures of control that edify culture.  The ‘word salad’, jumbles of words juxtaposed with jumbles of images, often in the photomontage, became the primary Dadaist mode of representing language in visual art.  Raoul Hausmann was a particularly strong proponent of this kind of work.

Raoul Hausmann - Elasticum (1920) 

More specific to this catalogue however, are detailed analyses of two of the most famous word/image works of these two movements.  Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q., from 1919:

Marcel Duchamp - L.H.O.O.Q. (1919)

a postcard reproduction of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa featuring a hand-drawn moustache and goatee over the famous portrait, and the letters LHOOQ written at the bottom, which, when pronounced out loud in French, are meant to sound as: "Elle a chaud au cul" which translates to English as, "She has a hot ass."  Duchamp was intentionally bringing bathroom stall humour to the eminent High Renaissance portrait.  

The other work of great importance to this exhibition was The Treachery of Images, the famous “this is not a pipe” painting of 1928 by the Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte (side note: Magritte is heavily represented in this text!).  This is the work that inspired Michel Foucault to investigate relationships between written language and its visual referrents, and is perennially used as a background or an introductory image to semiotic lectures and academic discussions on representation and reality.

Rene Magritte - The Treachery of Images (1928)

While the written component of this catalogue focuses on these particular works of art, or on the overarching concepts and strategies that these movements were working with, the actual catalogue component shows a variety of images from a wide swath of the Dada/Surrealism ranks.  Max Ernst, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann, Jean Crotti, Francis Picabia, and many more are represented.  There are also a number of works by figures such as Jean Cocteau, who were only tangentially connected to Surrealism, but whose visual works bear the influence of that movement’s ideas.  All of the images are in black and white, which isn’t so bad, since many of the works are drawings.  Also, the catalogue includes an interesting essay about Joan Miro and Magritte and critical theory (mostly Julia Kristeva’s) by University of California, San Diego professor John C. Welchman.

anarcho-syndicalism - book - 1918/1966 - Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism

Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism
Bertrand Russell
Unwin Books
1918/1966
143 pages

Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism was first published in 1918 when the words in his title applied to large scale social movements rather than distant ideologies.  It's author speaks of anarchism, syndicalism and socialism in the present tense, and refers to then recent events which are now historic.   In 1918 things were happening, syndicalism was popular and the lives of Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin had ended not so long ago.  The author of Roads to Freedom, Bertrand Russell, was polymath born of an aristocratic family.  He held sympathies with socialism, anarchism and syndicalism which he expressed in detail in this slim volume.  Russell was an avowed socialist at times in his life, and he occasionally returned to that subject in his writing throughout his career.

The first three chapters of Roads to Freedom comprise a section of the book titled ‘Historical’, which delves into the theories of Socialism (as they were derived from Marx and Engels), anarchism, (as derived from Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin) and anarcho-syndicalism. In this text syndicalism appears to be the political philosophy the author is most sympathetic with, as he focused much of his writing on the formation and activities of trade unions, discussing the potential robustness of a society as managed by and for workers.  This section of the book finds its author attempting to find the historical origins for the political theories he discusses, delving into the lives of the originating philosophers, as well as summarizing their ideas.  Russell, despite his aristocratic roots, poses as advocate for some of these political ideals, particularly socialism and syndicalism.

The second section of the book, ‘Problems of the Future’, is focused on the practical matters of managing societies based around the ideologies of socialism, anarchism or syndicalism.  Russell evaluates a number of important social and cultural questions against each set of ideals. Furthermore he interrogates the idealism behind certain aspects of these ideologies.  For example he argues against the naive notion, still propounded by contemporary anarchists, that crime is the result of the capitalist system - he argues that many forms of crime will persist and were the world to turn to anarchism, the question would become how to deal with it in a society based on an anti-authoritarian ethos.  Furthermore, he asks how are practical matters such as the arts to be supported under these systems, how is the defense of a country possible.  He attempts to imagine the pros and cons of how each issue would be dealt with under each ideological system as it stood in the early 20th century.  Furthermore, Russell does not simply raise issues but attempts to imagine workable answers to his own queries.  

Russell’s book is an impressive analysis of the early 20th century European left.  He took the ideologies of the left seriously, and while maintaining a sympathy with the spirit of these political systems he provides a positive critique on the practical matters that these systems would have to face, were they ever implemented as a system for broad social organization.  Colin Ward’s Anarchy in Action, a history of the actual implementation of anarchist principles in various times and places, may serve as an interesting companion text for comparison to Russell’s strong analysis.