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Essays (book reviews) |
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The Evil Demon of Images |
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I sometimes get the funny feeling that the world ended around 1984, and that we have been standing around shell-shocked ever since. By we, I mean those scene-y people (like myself) who live from the release of one culture magazine to the next, hanging out for the next big move. For, since the spectacular Futur*Fall conference (in Sydney 1984), there has been a prevalent, quizzical feeling that nothing has happened to really kick the cultural-intellectual game along. This is perhaps because Futur*Fall, in retrospect, seems to mark the end of the line in terms of sensational, hit-star Master Thinkers. From Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan (late 1970s) through to Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva (early ‘80s), this grand récit culminates in Jean Baudrillard (1983-1984) and the fall-out that surrounded his presence in Australia. But after Baudrillard? The closest contender would be Paul Virilio, but he is very much a post-Baudrillard phenomenon – both a continuation and a corrective. It would be nice to conclude that, since ‘84, we have transcended the immature need for commodified pop intellectuals mainly hailing from France. Ha! Perhaps we indeed exhausted that game, but we sure haven’t found a new one to replace it yet. The feeling that nothing serious or worthwhile has happened since ‘84 (cue Bowie song) is spookily affirmed by the appearance – almost three years late – of both the Futur*Fall book and Baudrillard’s inaugural Mari Kuttna memorial lecture, (1) now published as the slim (62 page) book titled The Evil Demon of Images. These two publications remain stonily oblivious to anything that just might have happened in the interim – debates about postmodernity, about the politics of cultural criticism, about the current situation of feminism or Marxism. No, nothing – not even another Mari Kuttna memorial lecture. (2) Baudrillard would no doubt be quite pleased to have presided over the beginning of the scene’s collective brain-death; he’d probably attribute it to a global entropy. Naturally, there are more banal, local reasons why these two volumes come to us late and mute in 1987 – reasons that are all too eloquent of the institutional paralysis in which some film study in Australia is immobilised. One can wonder afresh, while whipping through Baudrillard’s slight address, how in hell this person got called upon to deliver a major pronouncement on cinema. For – let’s not beat around the bush here – as film analysis, The Evil Demon of Images is bloody awful. I find it hard to be generous towards someone who pronounces himself an “unrestrained film buff” (presumably cinéphile in the original French!) and then goes on to base an argument about history, simulation and hyperrealism on the fact that he mistook The Last Picture Show (1971) for “a 1950s original” (“You need only be sufficiently distracted, as I was …”). That’s just a bit too unrestrained, by my standards. Elsewhere, you can find an occasional suggestive formulation – that “Chinatown [1974] is the detective story redesigned by laser” or that modern commercial films generally depend on a “combinatory process” – but these are slim pickings fleshed out elsewhere by livelier filmic minds. Within the strange, labyrinthine, The Name of the Rose-like politics of University of Sydney Fine Arts (the aptly named Power Institute), the machinations which come to posit someone like Baudrillard as a worthy lecturer on film are sadly symptomatic and more than a bit frightening. Here is the interdisciplinary urge gone bananas – the notion that, because Baudrillard has a few smart-sounding observations to make about television, popular culture, philosophy and politics, he must bear a new and important position on cinema, too. Hence the crazy non-synchronisation of an introduction (by Alan Cholodenko) which tries to pass Baudrillard off as a “theoretician of film” (god[ard] help us) with an interview (by Cholodenko, Ted Colless & David Kelly) that asks the great man about Descartes, Nietzsche and the fate of semiology – but not a single eensy-weensy question about cinema. And what of Baudrillard as dazzling philosophy-culturalist-historian-etc.? Where is the performance that might – just might – justify his arbitrary and fanciful elevation into the arena of film commentary? In Evil Demon, alas, Baudrillard’s rhetoric is in fact pretty poor, and thus his problems are more glaringly obvious than usual: his flip periodisations of cultural history, his reliance on a patently idiotic fiction of wholesale cultural change (from “meaning, history, a sensual rhetoric, dead moments, a passionate game” – that’s Visconti – to “large synthetic machines with variable geometry” – that’s Kubrick; I wouldn’t even bother to ask JB where Jonathan Demme might fit into this schema). It’s just as well to turn Baudrillard’s thundering, nihilistic posture against this very publication and its Australian location, by seeing clearly what’s going down. To
reheat this cold event [Futur*Fall, Baudrillard’s visit to
Australia] via a cold medium [the Power Institute], for masses who
are themselves cold [Fine Arts students], who will only find in it
the occasion for a tactile chill and a posthumous emotion, a
dissuasive shiver, which sends them into oblivion with a kind of
aesthetic good faith. (3) 1. For posterity: Mari Kuttna (1934-1983), born in Budapest and raised in Sydney, was a film critic, translator, programmer and educator whose reputation has been, sadly, rather lost to the mists of time. In the 1960s and ‘70s, while living in the UK, she wrote for publications including Sight and Sound, Self and Society and Montage. She died while preparing the 1983 Melbourne Film Festival, of which she had been appointed Director. back 2. There was, eventually, at least one further lecture in this series: Meaghan Morris’ brilliant “White Panic, or Mad Max and the Sublime” in 1991. An online search turns up no others, but I may be mistaken. back 3. Adapted from The Evil Demon of Images, p. 23. For the record, the “cold event” he is talking about here is the Holocaust (“tragic but cold”, he adds), the cold medium (à la Marshall McLuhan) is television, and the attempted “reheating” is that performed in vain by the TV miniseries Holocaust (Marvin J. Chomsky [cousin of Noam], 1978). back
© Adrian Martin May 1987 |
