LA CIUDAD EN MOVIMIENTO

jueves, septiembre 18, 2003:

c-theory says


Making the World Safe for Fashionable Philosophy! De cómo los directores de cine intentan permear su trabajo —¡qué ilusos!— con la filosofía de Baudrillard, Heidegger & Barthes con tan solo mostrar a personajes cargando libritos. O algo así.

He aquí un extracto: Near the beginning of The Matrix, Neo has hidden some data contraband inside a copy of Baudrillard's Simulations. The book is a joke of simulation in itself; bound in green cloth with gilt letters, it simulates the authority of a classic but has no backing or substance. It is all surface -- the inside has been cut out, is no longer essential. It is an empty prop in more ways than one. But is it a key to the film? Perhaps in the spirit of the logic of simulation, its presence merely simulates that there is an inner bookish meaning in what may be, in the end, a pure action film humdinger. A number of 90s films attempt the same sort of alliance between theoretical knowledge and film narrative. For example, in The Truth About Cats and Dogs, we find a love interest reading Barthes' Camera Lucida over the phone to a woman he thinks is Uma Thurman's character but who is in actuality her more brainy and ostensibly less physically desirable friend, played by Janeane Garofalo. If you remember, Barthes' book on photography is a meditation on the "punctum," the aspect of the photograph activated by subjective desire. The film seems to equate Barthes' "the punctum... is a kind of subtle beyond -- as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see" [1] with the more sententious "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," or some other triteness about inner beauty à la Cyrano de Bergerac. In a similar way, in Permanent Midnight, Elizabeth Hurley's character is reading Heidegger, and I can imagine it is a way to announce that the film is a reading of Heidegger's notion of "standing reserve." The term designates stockpiled resources on hand that, while products of technological progress, remain useless until they can reenter into the system. Permanent Midnight is about talent as standing reserve, and what happens while people wait for the call -- the nightmare of waiting implicit in Hollywood work.

Lee completo el artículo de Joe Milutis aquí

rafa // jueves, septiembre 18, 2003