Dear readers,
We are thrilled to share a roundup of recent e-flux Notes essays for your late-summer reading. These past two months we have augmented the breadth of e-flux Notes with the launch of Film Notes. This section explores the intersection of art and cinema through dialogues with artists and filmmakers, theoretical reflections, and historical and experimental writings.
In the inaugural Film Notes text, “This Art Called Cinema,” Lukas Brasiskis reflects on historical moments of convergence between cinema and visual art. In “Emotion Pictures,” Agnieszka Polska discusses her journey from animation to immersive installations. “Cinema as Oral Language” (1969) by Pier Paolo Pasolini explores the intrinsic connection between image and sound in cinema, arguing they form an indivisible “biunity.” Anton Vidokle presents excerpts from a film script based on a 1989 secret meeting of the Romanian Communist party, led by Nicolae Ceaușescu. In “Cosmos as Cinema,” Alexander Kluge imagines the cosmos as a vast archive of historical images streaming “past and through us.” Basim Magdy discusses his transition from painting to filmmaking, emphasizing the importance of accidents and personal involvement in editing. Shana Moulton reflects on her episodic series of videos, discussing the influences that shaped her style and the creation of her character Cynthia. Lastly, Jonas Mekas’s “Anti-100 Years of Cinema Manifesto” (written in 1996) challenges mainstream celebrations of cinema’s centennial by advocating for small, personal acts of filmmaking.
In our roundup of newly published books, we highlighted the translation of David Lapoujade’s Worlds Built to Fall Apart: Versions of Philip K. Dick, where he writes of the “delirious possibilities” conjured by Dick’s science fiction, contesting the arbitrariness and artifice of prevailing reality. Alenka Zupančič’s Disavowal unfolds that particular Freudian defense mechanism as the key to contemporary ideology, especially as regards climate change; in the excerpt “Science or Authority?” she distinguishes between science as corrosive of traditional authority and the social authority of science. Benjamin Noys reviews Fredric Jameson’s magisterial survey of contemporary global literature, Inventions of a Present, examining its claim that “the utopian charge of the contemporary historical novel lies in its capacity to be a ‘novel of the collective.’” And Matteo Pasquinelli sharply responds to criticism of his book The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence: “Let’s end this sabbatical from the living contradictions of labor politics.”
Isabel Jacobs visits the exhibition of Bertolt Brecht’s collages at Raven Row in London: “Brecht’s collages tell history not from the standpoint of the victor, the ruling class, but from that of the defeated, from below. They lend their voice to the forsaken, minor, oppressed … And if only for one sticky moment, damaged life has proved that it is alive.” In “Extractivist Geographies of the Bolivian Exhibition at the Russian Pavilion (Venice Biennale 2024),” Olexii Kuchanskyi examines the show’s contradictions in light of the Russian pavilion’s history and current political function, as “neoliberal in content and Soviet in form, but also militarist and still colonial.” Xin Wang offers a wildly inventive take on the history of an all-too-easily dismissed genre, in “Feral Socialist Realism.” And, writing on a lesser-known short story by Edgar Allan Poe, Alexi Kukuljevic presents a remarkable appreciation of the power of the devil in modernity, as the “interstice of reason,” “the angel of the odd,” a “fillip of the letter.”
Ilya Budraitskis pens an illuminating analysis of the new far right in “Putinist Russia and the World’s Fascist Moment.” Reporting from Mexico, Irmgard Emmelhainz assesses the hopes and potential dangers of the election of AMLO’s ally Claudia Sheinbaum to the presidency. Slavoj Žižek writes on Mark Romanek’s film Never Let Me Go, based on the SF novel by Kazuo Ishiguro about clones raised to be organ donors, “arguably the most depressing film I’ve ever seen.” And, continuing his regular column with us, Boris Groys revisits Pussy Riot’s 2012 punk prayer performance, in its avant-gardist desire to reawaken “sacred forces” of the “divine and the demonic.”