Continued from Wednesday… Not much more to add. I reread it and it seems I have said all that needs to be said. I can say that now I am ready to go home and that I couldn’t possibly fit one more hour of class into my head, let alone one more class series. We had a small concluding address from Wolfgang last night who assured us that we were the best class ever. Gee, thanks Wolfgang, but I bet you tell that to all your classes. I am so excited to be going back to my family and a less rigid schedule.
I am writing this in the lobby of the Hotel Allalin, patiently awaiting the bus that will sweep us away to the train and the Zurich airport. It’s Friday morning and time to go back home. Amanda and I spent yesterday roaming the town and shopping the unbelievably expensive stores catering to the rich ski tourists that frequent here. But it was nice to just relax and take the moment in. We haven’t had too much time to really let everything soak in until now. And in fact writing here has been the only real chance I have had to substantially reflect on the experience, and it has become more of a regurgitation station than a space for reflection. For what its worth, it has been an exhausting, at times frustrating, but incredible experience. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
1 year ago
Classes are over! Forgive me if I sound excited, but I am ready to come home. It has been a great experience, but three weeks is a long time to be here away from my family. I feel lucky to have had the chance to participate in such an innovative program, and meet some of the leaders in their respective fields. With that said: it is now time to come home. I won’t go back empty handed; I’ll have some delicious chocolate and literally hundreds of photos to testify to the experience.
Our group was one class ahead of some of the other groups so tomorrow will be a day off. I’ll use it to do some shopping and visit some of the other parts of the town that I missed while flattening my butt on the hard wood chairs six hours a day. We finished a very informative session with director Tom Kalin who also teaches narrative filmmaking at Columbia film school. It made me yearn a little bit for the days when I fantasized about somehow making a career in making movies. Ah, the days of naiveté! I actually missed it for a little while. Tom showed us some of the films that he has helped produced, including I Shot Andy Warhol, and some of his experimental films. He also framed the discussions with his early work with an AIDS awareness collective called Gran Fury that participated in a lot of art intervention strategies in the 1980’s in New York City. It was an extremely well positioned way to contextualize his feature film work.
First he showed us Swoon, his first feature from 1992 that dealt with the early 1920’s murder of a 13 year old boy by two gay men. He had used the public trial transcripts, which apparently are in the public domain. In fact Tom explained that any private citizen who commits a public crime forfeits his right to privacy. So any event from a trial is in the public domain. Most of Tom’s feature work is interested in representing real life events. The film did not offer a sympathetic portrayal of the murderers, but it also had them as the protagonists so identification was problematic. Tom explained how he interrogates crimes through the perspective of the criminal, in other words the audience will be forced into an ambivalent position with the protagonists. It’s challenging to show empathy to such disturbed individuals; however it is this disturbance itself that demands to be considered in the place of judgment.
Tom showed us his newest feature that he had just finished recently called Savage Grace. He got Julianne Moore to play the lead even with a relatively small budget. It premiered at Cannes last year supposedly to a standing ovation. However, it has received extremely mixed reviews. This is mostly due to the difficult subject matter, that comes from the real life story (and book by the same name) of an affluent family from the fifties into the early seventies. Julianne Moore plays a mother whose attachment to her son becomes a little inappropriate over the years. Eventually it is discovered that they have an incestuous relationship and the boy ultimately kills his mother. Obviously not the feel-good movie of the year. And I just realized that I will deter anyone reading this awful description from going to see the movie when it comes out. So forget I told you all of this and pretend that is a romantic comedy about a girl named Grace. Once again it follows theses disturbed people through twenty-six years of painful lives that lead to a painful, but oddly liberating end. So much mutual abuse is finally ended by the murder; it becomes more of a suicide facilitated by both participants. No matter what it is an awful story, but it cannot not be an awful story that comes to an awful end. Whatever you think of the content, Tom handled the story with elegance and empathy for two characters who may have been healthy people had they not formed such a destructive relationship.
I thanked Tom personally after the film because, although the boy in real life had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, he did not reduce the character to the illness. Instead he avoided confronting the medical model at all and only hinted at a possible destabilization to the boy’s character. He never says anything about schizophrenia and avoids conflating mental illness and violent crime. This movie affected me more than another movie in recent memory, probably because I have a family with little kids and anything that portrays the deterioration of familial relationships easily distresses me. I felt angry after and I wasn’t sure why. I realized that it could be a lot of things, and I would just have to live with that confusion. In fact, after writing all of this I am going to have to finish my thoughts tomorrow. Three weeks of EGS has just completely drowned my nerves, and it has all come crashing down on this the last night of classes. With a little distance I may even say something coherent.
1 year ago
We are now down to one class left. We had our last session with Claire Denis today by screening The Intruder and then asking her more personal questions about her filmmaking process. She told us interesting stories of both how she comes up with her ideas and then shoots them. She emphasized that she does not go into a film project with a theme in mind that she then translates into a story, but that her stories come first and then demand certain themes and styles. Style is something that is determined by the subject matter rather than imposing a general vision onto a particular story. She also discussed the self-indulgent aesthetic tendencies of the much heralded democratic “modern” filmmaking, post portable cameras and sound equipment. It was a fascinating argument that I had always pondered: what if the old studio system was actually more democratic by offering those willing to put in the work an opportunity to become directors, while the so-called independent venues claim to offer it to everyone. Claire suggested that the French New Wave and the independent cinemas after were steeped in auteur selfishness and bourgeois sensibilities. The illusion is anyone can make a film. The reality remains that few actually do. You don’t have to agree with it, you just have to read about it here.
This afternoon Amanda and I had lunch with Claire and discussed more personal aspects of her work. Supposedly South Koreans consider it rude if you do not get drunk with them. Who knew?! We just got back from having dinner with Polish filmmaker Krystof Zanussi. He told us all about how his close friendship with Andrei Tarkovsky and how he produced films for Andrzej Wajda. He was personally offended that students had such a hard time with Tarkovsky’s films. Then he invited Amanda and I to his home in Poland; anytime we happened to be in the neighborhood we could stop by for free bed and breakfast. I’ll have to remember that next time I am in Poland!
It’s raining Swiss cats and dogs outside again, but I am now reserved to the fact that we just came at a bad weather time. And since we had such a beautiful day to hike and generally stand in awe at the beautifulness in all its bountiful beauty I am content to let it rain. One class left with Tom Kalin, another filmmaker.
1 year ago
I woke up the next morning barely able to move. I felt like the Tin Man as I waddled to our next set of classes. Wolfgang had given us permission to sit in on Claire Denis’ class instead of being tortured by him. What a nice guy. Claire is relatively well known a French filmmaker that has adapted some philosophical works to the screen, most notably Jean-Luc Nancy into her film The Intruder. She is small framed and extremely outspoken, ready to call you out on whatever idiotic thing you decide to inflict upon the class in the form of pseudo-philosophical thought. She is refreshingly against showing us her films in class just in order to have us ask her personal questions. She does not want a Claire Denis class, she wants a film class taught by Claire Denis. Cool. I totally respect that. Unfortunately, seems that it has alienated a lot of the class (interestingly enough, it is a majority of the students who seemed so turned off by the fact that Larry had turned a lot of his class into the Sue de Beer class. Can you say, wanting both the having of the cake and the eating of it as well?!).
We started off by watching an unfinished new film of her’s titled White Material, about youth soldiers and violence in Cameroon. Then she had us screen Fritz Lang’s Fury in order to begin speaking about storytelling. It was great, but apparently she hates it, but it served the purposes of the discussion. I am hearing whispers of a class mutiny, so we will see how many students actually have the testicular fortitude to show up for day two.
1 year ago
I haven’t felt the urgency to write as much here as Amanda has been keeping up so well on her posting. Plus she has added all sorts of fun links and photos, I simply can’t compete with that. I would have written a ton on our day off Thursday, except that we were busy doing Switzerland type stuff like climbing mountains, riding gondolas, and spotting goats. So it was actually a good kind of busy and we of course have the pictures to prove it.
I didn’t write at all during our three days with Bracha Ettinger, a feminist artist, theorist, and practicing Psychoanalyst. Bracha followed a more Lacanian psychoanalytic approach, while Larry had been more of a Freudian, so it was interesting to get the different perspectives. She started out by showing us some of her painting, which is a result of her theory of what she calls the “matrixial borderspace,” a sort of feminist movement away from Lacan and with what she claimed as a more practical application than Deleuze and Guattari’s “schizoanalysis.” Whether that is true or not she articulated her thoughts extremely thoroughly, reading often from her own articles on the subject. As much as I appreciated her ability to transmit her knowledge, Lacan is difficult enough to read, let alone listen to someone read their interpretations to you. So the class was much more interesting when she would stop reading to interpret sections on the drawing board. All in all it was a Freud-tastic week of psychoanalysis that would make even Lacan party like he had just found his objet petit a.
Thursday we were determined to threaten the Swiss weather gods until they gave us enough sunshine to hike up the nearby mountain and have a decent look around. Well, they heard our distant plea and the clouds parted and the EGS students did rejoice with feasts of fried foods and artichoke hearts. Amanda and I got a relatively early start and rode the gondola up to about the halfway mark of the peak adjacent to Saas Fee. The ride was delightfully long and we could see the entire valley and the surrounding towns. We took a trail that lead up to the top of the peak, winding back and forth until we started to see patches of snow. This wasn’t exactly the tallest peak around, but it was definitely plenty to fill our itch for some Swiss Alps hiking action. Amanda climbed for as long as she could stand her asthmatic weezing (which, to her credit, was quite a while) and so I traversed the remainder of the trail alone. The climbing got steeper and the trail got narrower to the point that I was convinced that I was actually following a mountain goat path. I lost the marked trail a few times, but I eventually made it to an large area of snow and across from it was the top. I trudged through the snow and then had to actually climb ledges the last fifty feet or so, before I finally made it to the top. The view was incredible and I took a panorama shot of the entire valley and the mountains behind. I could see the highest peak in the Swiss Alps, Monte Rosa, as well as all the little towns scatter up through the valley to Saas Fee and even beyond. And if nothing else I can now say that I climbed the Swiss Alps (well, at least one of them).
The climb down wasn’t nearly as exciting, but interesting nonetheless. We met a crazy German guy that ran over to greet us as we came back down toward the gondola and couldn’t stop talking to us in a mixture of German and English. We could still hear him greeting those on their way up as we proceeded down. We came back down through relatively dense wooded areas, keeping close to the mountain goat path that lead us up over an electric fence and over several streams. We were grateful when we finally saw a paved road again and made it back to the hotel just before lunch closed down. We threw down our food and ran back to our rooms intending to take short but productive naps, only to end up sleeping for a good three hours. But just for anyone reading this, I definitely needed it. Plus it was my day off, so back off!
1 year ago
Short note here while I wait for Kristin to logon to Google Talk for our eDate. We finished our class series today with Larry Rickles and Sue de Beer. I thought the class was a great entrance into psychoanalytic thought on mourning and haunting in thought and art. It seems this was not the view of a lot of the other students who decided not to continue to attend due to whatever reasons they could rationalize. In any case they missed out, but we missed out as well.
Amanda has been sick enough that she had to miss out on the morning session today. It’s not that it is really serious as much as it is affecting her ability (and apparently those around her) to completely concentrate. I am feeling fine, however, and expect to continue as such seeing how we have been roommates now for over a week.
This evening we were privileged to have Irish author Colum McCann offer a reading from his new novel. It was interesting and, including Sue’s film last night, was a nice break from the usual academic rigor we participate in during the day. The sun broke through for a while during lunch and it hardly rained. This may be a sign of good things to come in the second half of the summer.
1 year ago
As we draw close to the halfway mark I must say that I am becoming more and more enamored with extending the boundaries of academic learning. The traditional university has its benefits, of course, but it comes with its own risks. Rigid disciplinary fields have territorialized teaching, learning, and research to the point that it has become very difficult to transfer knowledge, even while that knowledge resists this same territorialization. I suppose that is the driving force behind RCID, but that is also the obstacle against RCID. EGS as well has its own risks and benefits, however, it has created a place that allows knowledge to spill over, and even encourages students to spill over themselves. Part of why I am saying this is because of the negativity I have displayed toward the weather. I don’t want to give the wrong impression that the weather reflects my experience in any way.
With that said, we haven’t seen the mountains in two days. But the dreary weather has been appropriate as we have been participating in seminars on Haunted Thought and Art from Larry Rickels. He brought along filmmaker/artist Sue de Beer from NYU to show her films and discuss issues of loss and mourning relating to ghosts and haunting (especially in adolescents). Most of Larry’s work is in Freud and Psychoanalysis and it has been very interesting having a real psychoanalyst in class. I am afraid to speak thinking that any comment I make could be about my father and my desire to return to the womb. That was a terribly stereotypical representation of psychoanalysts. What I meant was that it could mean I haven’t successfully mourned my first death (separation from my mother). That actually could be true. My mother always said I was a traumatic birth.
Sue’s works with what she calls “two channel” films, a split screen that sometimes folds in on itself and sometimes becomes a reflection of itself. Mostly today we just watched Pink Floyd Live in Pompeii, which she says was a big inspiration. She also gave the night’s presentation of The Quickening, a film that she describes as a “psychedelic historical film.” Whatever that means. But the label is actually quite accurate; Puritans who listen to John Denver and get high with a William S. Burroughs Dream Machine… it’s even better than it sounds!
I washed some clothes today in the bathtub, and you know what, it was difficult. But luckily I brought enough clothes to last the rest of my time here. Amanda has been sick with a cold and is coughing up a storm. It’s starting to get annoying. Yes, Amanda, if you’re reading this, stop coughing. I know you can’t help it, but for crying out loud show some respect for your colleagues. I really have to start looking for a place to stay the night before my flight in Zurich. The Euro Cup is starting here in Switzerland and I may be left out in the cold. No seriously, I literally mean I will be out in the freezing Swiss weather. Maybe I can find a nice warm cardboard box somewhere. Time for bed.
1 year ago
A day off at EGS is not a day off in the traditional sense. This morning Amanda and I slept in one hour longer than usual so as to grab breakfast before sitting in on another class. You gotta make the most out of the opportunity. We walked up the steep slope to the classrooms to attend the morning session of Manuel DeLanda’s seminar on Deleuze and Science. This was the third and last day for them so we were a little lost, but from what we saw we were excited by his style (a very science, very objective based approach) and the simple way he was able to sketch out difficult concepts so we could follow and understand them. We discussed Deleuze’s notion of the “body without organs” in the context of stemcell research as pluripotent cells. These cells, which had yet to reach a singular form and represented a space of possibilities, could represent the mind as a deterritorialized space of possibilities. All three classes I have participated in so far have offered very diverse readings and approaches to scholarship that tends to be essentialized, even while these authors and ideas resist essentialization.
Still, it is nice to finally have a day to relax and absorb the past week. I have had time to reflect, but it always seems to be in between time: class, meals, sleep. Amanda and I really wanted to take a trip into the mountains to hike, maybe check out the glacier. But once again it is raining on and off (mostly on) and it is just getting depressing. The moments the sun does break through the clouds it is a glorious moment that unveils the jagged mountain-scape and steep valleys. It is a place of clean air and easy breathing, only to take the breath away. Alas, it does not last, and like a Shangra-la it veils the myth back into a curtain of grey clouds and thick fog. With that said, it is nice to have an excuse to stay inside and just vegetate in the hotel lobby and use the interweb. Maybe next Thursday we will take a ride on the gondola and then I will post the magnificent, sunny pictures.
We finished Sylvere’s seminar yesterday and it was exhausting. He was a wealth of information and I took more notes in those three days than in most of my semester length classes. We finished talking about Baudrillard’s discussions about 9/11 and the World Trade Center as a point of gift and counter-gift. We had “gift” (gift here is a rhetorical word) the world forms of democracy and capitalism, and according to Baudrillard’s notion of symbolic exchange we were owed a return gift, a response to our challenge. For Baudrillard this is the exchange collision of 9/11. Sylvere ended with an encouraging statement on taking these ideas not as totalities or critiques, but as extractions. He encouraged us to be in the right position in order to read a text and extract, rather than critique and dismiss. It was a(n) (un)timely thought as part of three days of interruptions that became an Event.
Later that day Amanda and I had the privilege of eating dinner with Victor and Sylvere, discussing the past few days and the work that never was from these dead thinkers. Sylvere told us about how difficult it was for him to get over Baudrillard’s death a year or so ago and that he was to return to Baudrillard’s home to go through some of the papers his widow didn’t know what to do with. They also discussed a mostly mythological manuscript from Badiou and Deleuze that hasn’t been published and most likely won’t be at Deleuze’s family’s behest. It was engaging to hear the secret lives of these people that seem so distance by their texts in a very human kind of way. Sylvere positioned Zizek as the buffoon to Badiou’s straight man before we even pointed out to him that they both teach here during August. It was a nice moment, one of those meals that I won’t soon forget.
It’s possible I will have so much time today that I will even upload some pictures. I know you are all just standing on edge for me to update my writing so I will try not to disappoint.
1 year ago
