Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Anthropology gets its own song :D
'Anthro professors, they're all kinda crazy
Got their agendas, trying to recruit our P-O-Vs
Deep down inside they're all in love with -- Malinowski'
Fragment 2-Cityscapes and Lost in Translation
What better way to concretise what I have said about cities and cityscapes then to frame what I have said within the film Lost in Translation. What I will say about this film will probably add nothing to the scores of what has already been said about this film; perhaps the only strange thing about this commentary is that I felt rather disappointed and estranged by the end of the film when I expected to be powerfully moved given Sofia Coppola's debut The Virgin Suicides was one of, if not the most ground shaking, earth shattering films I have ever had the pleasure of watching.
If I had to hazard a guess as to why I wasn't immediately struck by the film was because I was so expectant, so excited to watch this that I was left with an anti-climactic feeling. This may be part of the reason. Perhaps a better reason was because I loathe the position that the characters found themselves in; one of confusion, indecisiveness on the part of Charlotte and disenchantment and tire on the part of Bob Harris. It offers no consolation whatsoever for those who are in the position of Charlotte, a lonely philosophy graduate married to a man that cannot annihilate her loneliness. Is Bob Harris her future?
And it is precisely because of the fact that it makes no attempt to offer a solution to the confusion, the 'existential crisis' if you will, that it perfectly expresses the state of post-modern individuals. There is only the certainty of uncertainty and this to me expresses perfectly what one feels when looking at the city scape. Once the gaze lands on the city, once the mind quiets itself and you let yourself take in the city, you are left with the mosaic, the embroidered fabric of all these feelings: uncertainty, loneliness, fear of the unknown and certainty of the this lack of knowledge. Even if you didn't like Lost in Translation you cannot deny that the cinematographer manages to capture, truly capture within a film, all I have said about the cityscape. A man called Ulrich Beck speaks of this. Human beings always attempt explanations 'when things go wrong', well what happens when an all-encompassing cosmology i.e. God, leaves the picture? That is what our beloved Nietzsche, in his too often quoted gobbet 'God is dead' was trying to say. Beck says that when God leaves the picture, risk or danger enters the picture.
Of course, people like Beck are trying to answer the question as to what we should do now that we have killed God, now that we have no all-encompassing cosmology to explain, and therefore explain away every bit of our lives. We do have explanations for everything, but ultimately all this knowledge is contested, and we have to believe in knowledge until it applies no longer. This is why Bob Harris, despite having more experience than Charlotte, is just as confused as her, if not more. Sofia Coppola offers us no explanation. She only presents to us the one thing we are sure of; that we are not sure of anything at all, that bearing the responsibility of choice is hard, that using that choice to shape who we are is even harder. We are presented with what we have to face everything, the ebb and flow of the uncertainties of our lives. It's interesting that the screen writers chose Japan. At least in the history of American anthropology, Japan was always a place of interest because Americans understood so very little of Japan, yet they had to rub against them and face them as enemies in World War 2. For anthropologists, and probably for Americans in general, Japan still remains an exotic wonderland whose cultural is difficult to understand. It is the perfect place to question your own Western cosmology.
Am I the only though who felt like Coppola was poking a little fun at the Japanese? :p
If I had to hazard a guess as to why I wasn't immediately struck by the film was because I was so expectant, so excited to watch this that I was left with an anti-climactic feeling. This may be part of the reason. Perhaps a better reason was because I loathe the position that the characters found themselves in; one of confusion, indecisiveness on the part of Charlotte and disenchantment and tire on the part of Bob Harris. It offers no consolation whatsoever for those who are in the position of Charlotte, a lonely philosophy graduate married to a man that cannot annihilate her loneliness. Is Bob Harris her future?
And it is precisely because of the fact that it makes no attempt to offer a solution to the confusion, the 'existential crisis' if you will, that it perfectly expresses the state of post-modern individuals. There is only the certainty of uncertainty and this to me expresses perfectly what one feels when looking at the city scape. Once the gaze lands on the city, once the mind quiets itself and you let yourself take in the city, you are left with the mosaic, the embroidered fabric of all these feelings: uncertainty, loneliness, fear of the unknown and certainty of the this lack of knowledge. Even if you didn't like Lost in Translation you cannot deny that the cinematographer manages to capture, truly capture within a film, all I have said about the cityscape. A man called Ulrich Beck speaks of this. Human beings always attempt explanations 'when things go wrong', well what happens when an all-encompassing cosmology i.e. God, leaves the picture? That is what our beloved Nietzsche, in his too often quoted gobbet 'God is dead' was trying to say. Beck says that when God leaves the picture, risk or danger enters the picture.
Of course, people like Beck are trying to answer the question as to what we should do now that we have killed God, now that we have no all-encompassing cosmology to explain, and therefore explain away every bit of our lives. We do have explanations for everything, but ultimately all this knowledge is contested, and we have to believe in knowledge until it applies no longer. This is why Bob Harris, despite having more experience than Charlotte, is just as confused as her, if not more. Sofia Coppola offers us no explanation. She only presents to us the one thing we are sure of; that we are not sure of anything at all, that bearing the responsibility of choice is hard, that using that choice to shape who we are is even harder. We are presented with what we have to face everything, the ebb and flow of the uncertainties of our lives. It's interesting that the screen writers chose Japan. At least in the history of American anthropology, Japan was always a place of interest because Americans understood so very little of Japan, yet they had to rub against them and face them as enemies in World War 2. For anthropologists, and probably for Americans in general, Japan still remains an exotic wonderland whose cultural is difficult to understand. It is the perfect place to question your own Western cosmology.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Fragment 1-Cityscapes
Cityscapes seem to me to be the ultimate expressive space of the post-modern age; it's melancholic, it's dazzling, it offers countless choices, it's cosmopolitan, it's dead and romantic. All of this is conjured up just by looking at a cityscape or an exceptionally good photograph of one.
Above all else, a cityscape is lonely. If you are walking across the sand dunes of the Sahara, you are alone, but probably not lonely. If you are crossing the road in Tokyo City Centre with another 100 people, even if you are caught in the interims of a conversation, there is the chance you will feel lonely. Nothing spurs on the feeling of loneliness more than several hundred, several thousand, several million bodies around you. Loneliness is a lack of access-cityscapes express this. Loneliness is when almost infinite choice (many people, many meeting places) is compounded with the crushing feeling of not knowing what the right choice is-cityscapes express this. How can you ever know when or where you will meet the right person to strike the right conversation with? When I look at a cityscape I think, experiences overflowing upon experiences. All those little window lights, all those little streets, all those cars on their way to somewhere(and the experience of travel itself), all those are collectivities of human experience.
It is difficult to express the beauty of the cityscape. It is difficult to express the simultaneous awe and crushing blow; on the one hand you have raw, visceral human experience multiplied by millions and on the other hand it is covered by the cold touch of the concrete, the calculations of the architect. So much heaving, breathing substance leaves you breathless.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)