Cats are crazy demanding love machines. Watch out!
3/19/10
3/18/10
Some Words and Sounds
3/17/10
Propaganda for Today
I may be forgetting some, but two movies I watched recently had to do with the industries and systems that get the food we eat from the soil, water, pastures, and cages to our tables, lunchboxes, takeout containers, and stomachs. These were the documentaries Unser täglich Brot (Our Daily Bread, 2005) and No Impact Man: The Documentary (2009). The first is a completely word-less series of slow pans in various North and East European food facilities where machines and people pick, sort, process, and package every kind of plant and animal you can imagine. The second follows a man and his family around Brooklyn and Manhattan as they attempt to lead their lives while making the least amount of environmental impact possible for one year.
Though we may safely assume that both films aim to expose their viewers to the hidden impact and meaning of their habitual, daily consumption, the way they go about this task is pretty much as different as you can imagine. While Colin Beavin, the guinea pig of the No Impact Man project has set out to raise awareness by example and appeal, Nikolaus Geyerhalter, the director of Unser täglich Brot believes in revealing the unseen cogs in the machine and allowing his viewer plenty of time to think and come to her own uncomfortable conclusions. While Beavin's journey is portrayed through the trials and difficulties it showers on his relationship with his wife (a familiar narrative of blissful ignorance and the eventual acceptance of hard-but-good-for-you truths), Geyerhalter's film aspires to something closer to horror: you are sucked in by the pristine beauty of shiny conveyor belts and endless fields of sunflowers only to be confronted with the similarly beautiful precision of streams of baby chicks coming down the chute or the hyper-efficient dismemberment of hanging cows carcasses. The first is light on shock value (you see the burning land-fills in the Bronx, but there are no sick children who are ostensibly breathing the gases), while the second is light on message (is the aesthetic repetition of these horrific images about our numbness to the realities of food production, or should we be relieved that the facilities are so clean, safe, and effective?)
I started thinking today that both of these films propose a model of propaganda for the present day. They each try to employ their form and genre in a way that changes the viewer's consciousness and by extension (hopefully) her actions. While Beavin has been criticized for trivializing a serious issue for self-promotion, it was actually his earnestness - he looked profoundly worried in literally every shot and there was more than one situation in which his commitment to the project led to what seemed like a conflict in the very fabric of the couple's relationship - that was the movie's driving force. The story of their relationship became a model for the viewer's own potential transformation as a consumer and citizen. It had all the tropes of a cheesy romantic comedy, and yet its use of these tropes within the propaganda model made me more determined to sacrifice, waste less, do more. In other words, it worked.
Our Daily Bread, on the other hand, while seeming to be far more self-conscious of its form and formal qualities, is far less successful, to my mind, as propaganda. True, when I saw this film I was so disturbed by the images, I literally could not speak and had to cut the evening short because I could no longer interact with the people I had come to visit. On me, the form had done its job. But this was not the case across the board: my friends, who I might mention were not vegetarians already, were certainly affected, but not so much that they could not step outside the experience in order to discuss it and they did not, as far as I know, change their attitudes to meat-eating. The film revealed processes for sure, but it did not judge them, and in the end, the revelation was mostly about aesthetics, of providing an iconography to something that we try to not look at or think about too much. What we do with that iconography, lacking a clear directive, is I suppose our own business.
So, what is this about? What am I trying to get at? I suppose one thing we should think about is the subject of these variously successful attempts at what I'm calling "propaganda for today" - they are about food, clothing, personal consumption, farms and food processing facilities, living in cities, interconnectedness, local and global industry; they are about the way that I am connected to the bigger picture through the world of things. But not - for the most part - the long view of history, social injustice, how I relate to others, or what has brought me to this point. And while they do aim for change, they locate that change squarely in my individual consciousness, by appealing to me as an individual viewer, not - as was of course the case in many more familiar examples of propaganda in the last century - to us. Is this about the disintegration of the "big stories" or a new belief in the collective potential of micro-changes? As often happens with propaganda, I guess it's less important how change happens, as that it happens at all, by any means necessary. These seem to be the means we're using now. I wish I could believe that they will make a difference.
Though we may safely assume that both films aim to expose their viewers to the hidden impact and meaning of their habitual, daily consumption, the way they go about this task is pretty much as different as you can imagine. While Colin Beavin, the guinea pig of the No Impact Man project has set out to raise awareness by example and appeal, Nikolaus Geyerhalter, the director of Unser täglich Brot believes in revealing the unseen cogs in the machine and allowing his viewer plenty of time to think and come to her own uncomfortable conclusions. While Beavin's journey is portrayed through the trials and difficulties it showers on his relationship with his wife (a familiar narrative of blissful ignorance and the eventual acceptance of hard-but-good-for-you truths), Geyerhalter's film aspires to something closer to horror: you are sucked in by the pristine beauty of shiny conveyor belts and endless fields of sunflowers only to be confronted with the similarly beautiful precision of streams of baby chicks coming down the chute or the hyper-efficient dismemberment of hanging cows carcasses. The first is light on shock value (you see the burning land-fills in the Bronx, but there are no sick children who are ostensibly breathing the gases), while the second is light on message (is the aesthetic repetition of these horrific images about our numbness to the realities of food production, or should we be relieved that the facilities are so clean, safe, and effective?)
I started thinking today that both of these films propose a model of propaganda for the present day. They each try to employ their form and genre in a way that changes the viewer's consciousness and by extension (hopefully) her actions. While Beavin has been criticized for trivializing a serious issue for self-promotion, it was actually his earnestness - he looked profoundly worried in literally every shot and there was more than one situation in which his commitment to the project led to what seemed like a conflict in the very fabric of the couple's relationship - that was the movie's driving force. The story of their relationship became a model for the viewer's own potential transformation as a consumer and citizen. It had all the tropes of a cheesy romantic comedy, and yet its use of these tropes within the propaganda model made me more determined to sacrifice, waste less, do more. In other words, it worked.
Our Daily Bread, on the other hand, while seeming to be far more self-conscious of its form and formal qualities, is far less successful, to my mind, as propaganda. True, when I saw this film I was so disturbed by the images, I literally could not speak and had to cut the evening short because I could no longer interact with the people I had come to visit. On me, the form had done its job. But this was not the case across the board: my friends, who I might mention were not vegetarians already, were certainly affected, but not so much that they could not step outside the experience in order to discuss it and they did not, as far as I know, change their attitudes to meat-eating. The film revealed processes for sure, but it did not judge them, and in the end, the revelation was mostly about aesthetics, of providing an iconography to something that we try to not look at or think about too much. What we do with that iconography, lacking a clear directive, is I suppose our own business.
So, what is this about? What am I trying to get at? I suppose one thing we should think about is the subject of these variously successful attempts at what I'm calling "propaganda for today" - they are about food, clothing, personal consumption, farms and food processing facilities, living in cities, interconnectedness, local and global industry; they are about the way that I am connected to the bigger picture through the world of things. But not - for the most part - the long view of history, social injustice, how I relate to others, or what has brought me to this point. And while they do aim for change, they locate that change squarely in my individual consciousness, by appealing to me as an individual viewer, not - as was of course the case in many more familiar examples of propaganda in the last century - to us. Is this about the disintegration of the "big stories" or a new belief in the collective potential of micro-changes? As often happens with propaganda, I guess it's less important how change happens, as that it happens at all, by any means necessary. These seem to be the means we're using now. I wish I could believe that they will make a difference.
3/10/10
O Happy Day!
Google maps now has a "bike there" option. Already, it is telling me to avoid the Atlantic Ave./Flatbush Ave. intersection on my way to the Manhattan Bridge by cutting over early on Bergen St. and going up Jay St. Okay, duuuuuuh, why didn't I think of this before? Thank you google machine. Though I'm not sure the detour to FDR Drive is really necessary when I can just go up Chrystie St./2nd Ave. all the way to my destination. Still, good to know it cares about my vistas as well as my safety. Excited!
(um, if only they would fix the route-dragging function...it feels like trying to scratch your head with ski gloves on.)
1/10/10
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