Stefan Zeyen Arbeiten/Works

Von der Verachtung/About Contempt 2015 Fin 2013 Farewell Flashlights White Nights 2009 Hurt 2010 Weekend 2004/2010 2 Seconds Autumn 2010 Erkner 2005 Performance Proposal 2005 Man/Island 2005 About Cinemascope 2004 Weiß/White 2002 CV On the Post-Cinema Daniel Miller

Von der Verachtung/About Contempt, 2015 103 min, 4K, Stereo.

Eine exakte Replika von Jean-Luc Godard´s Film Die Verachtung, gedreht in einer leeren Kunstgalerie. Es gibt keine Schauspieler, Dialoge oder Filmsets, allein die Kamerabewegungen, die originalen Schnittfolgen und die für Solopiano transkribierte Filmmusik. An exact replica of Jean-Luc Godard´s 1962 film CONTEMPT, shot in an empty white art gallery. There are no actors, dialogues or sets, just the pure camera movement, the original editing and the musical score transposed for solo piano. Kamera/Cinematography Musik/Music

Michael Weihrauch Grace Freeman

Vorschau/View excerpt: (3min 15s): http://vimeo.com/stefanzeyen/aboutcontempt03 Passwort: Camille

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Fin 2013

23632 Papierdrucke zu einem Stapel von 25cm x 145cm x 21cm geschichtet. 23632 sheets of paper prints piled up to form a stack. 25 x 145 x 21 cm. Die Arbeit übersetzt 17 Minuten Filmzeit in Materie. Alle Einzelbilder aus Bunuel´s und Dali´s Un Chien Andalou formen aufeinandergeschichtet eine Säule aus Papier. Fin is a conversion piece of time into matter. Piling up every film frame of Luis Buñuel ́s and Salvador Dalí ́s short movie “Un chien andalou”, the film ́s length of 17 minutes translates into a column of paper. The time flows from bottom to top, with the only visible image being the end title. The work ows its existence to gravity. It is reversible at all times and very, very fragile.

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Eine Trilogie/A trilogy: Farewell/Flashlights/White Nights

Farewell 2009

1min 41s, 35 mm Film transferiert auf/transferred to HD1080p Video, Projektion im Loop/looped projection, Stereo. Niemand will verlassen werden. Der Versuch, einen Abschied durch kinematografische Postproduktion zu verhindern. Eine Frau fährt im Cabrio davon. Diese Filmeinstellung wird kontinuierlich so ausvergrößert, daß die Wegfahrt neutralisiert wird und die Protagonistin ihre ursprüngliche Größe behält. Durch den physischen Zoom in das Filmmaterial degradiert das Bild langsam. Das Filmkorn wird größer und die Schärfe nimmt ab, bis das Bild vom Material absorbiert wird. Nobody likes to be left alone. Trying to make a departure undone by means of cinematographic postproduction. The film scene of a woman departing in a convertible is continually scaled up in such a way that the departing movement is neutralized and the protagonist retains her original size. With the physical zoom into the film material the image degrades continually. Film grain increases, sharpness decreases, until the image gets completely absorbed in the film material. Darsteller/Starring: Kamera/Cinematography: Postproduktion:

Megan Gay, Alexander Marinov. Michael Weihrauch. Peter Loczenski, Stefan Zeyen.

Vorschau/View film:

http://zeyen.de/farewell/farewell.html

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Flashlights 2009

12 Sekunden/seconds, Pressefotos auf 4K-Video transferiert, press photographies transferred to 4K video, Projektion im Loop/looped projection, Stereo.

Mit einer Länge von nur 12 Sekunden die zweite Arbeit mit der Schauspielerin Megan Gay. Ein typisches Phänomen des Medienzeitalters wird zu Film: Fotografen wartet vor dem Gebäude im Regen. Eine Frau erscheint in der Tür und eilt die Stufen hinunter. Fotografen schiessen Fotos, bis die Frau in einem Taxi entschwindet. Die Fotos werden chronologisch zusammengefügt und formen einen Film. 17 Fotografen verschmelzen zu einer großen Kamera. With a length of just 12 seconds the second work featuring actress Megan Gay. The work hijacks a common phenomenon of the media age, using press photos to generate a film: a group of press photographers wait outside the building in the rain.When the protagonist appears in the door and hurries down the stairs, they shoot as many photos of her as possible, until she dispappears into a waiting taxi. All the photos are collected, put into chronological order, and form as such a stopmotion animation of the incident. 17 photographers act as one big camera. Darsteller/Starring:

Megan Gay, Stefan Zeyen.

Kamera/Cinematography:

Sina Ackermann, Barack Bar-Am, Alexander Bartneck, Lars Borges, Georg Fichtenau, Niklas Goldbach, Florian Heß, Oliver Hille, Tilmann Kerkhoff, Simon Krahl, Rene Lehmann, Alexander Lieck, Sandra Lossau, Mato Pavlovic, Bernhard Semmelrock, Erik Smith, Angelina Tasic, Wendy Taylor, Clea Waite.

Schnitt und Ton/Editing and Sound:

Stefan Zeyen

Vorschau/View film: http://www.zeyen.de/flashlights/flashlights.html

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White Nights 2009 Fotocollage von analogen Kleinbildnegativen, auf Plexi montiert/C-print collage from analog SLR negatives mounted on plexi. 120 cm x 67,5 cm Die dritte Arbeit mit Megan Gay ist eine Fotocollage. Am Abend des längsten Tages steht eine Frau am Ufer der Ostsee und wendet sich dem Betrachter zu. Drei Farbfotos der Szene, die den klassischen Kadrierungen von Supertotale, Totale und Amerikanischer Einstellung entsprechen, werden übereinander montiert. Sie formen ein nahtloses Bild, weisen jedoch verschiedene Grade an Detail und Filmkorn auf. The third work featuring Megan Gay, this time a photographic collage. On the evening of the longest day of the year a woman stands at the shore of the baltic sea, looking back at the spectator. Three color prints of that same scene, corresponding to Extreme Long Shot, Long Shot and American Shot (three typical cinematic film framings), are physically mounted on top of each other. They form a seamless picture displaying various amounts of detail and grain. Mit/Starring: Kamera/Cinematography:

Megan Gay Stefan Zeyen

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Hurt 2010

3min 35sek. HD1080p Video, Stereo Ein Melodrama in 4 Einstellungen. A Melodrama in 4 takes.

Darsteller/Starring: Sandra Lossau, Stefan Zeyen Kamera/Cinematography: Stefan Zeyen Schnitt/Editing: Stefan Zeyen

Vorschau/View film:

http://www.zeyen.de/hurt/hurt.html

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Weekend 2010

Wandcollage aus 75 Farbpostern (50 cm x 70 cm), Gesamtgröße 35 Meter x 2 Meter/ Collage of 75 color flyposters (50 cm x 70 cm). Total size 35 Meter x 2 Meter Eine Fotocollage aus 75 Einzelbildern aus einer der längsten Kamerafahrten der Filmgeschichte. In Jean-Luc Godard´s Film Weekend fängt die Kamera in einer horizontalen Bewegung von mehr als 7 Minuten einen kompletten Autostau ein. Durch die räumliche Überlagerung zeitlich aufeinander folgender Bilder rekonstruiert die Wandarbeit den Stau in seiner Gesamtheit. Realisiert für die Ausstellung “Unspooling- artists and cinema”, Cornerhouse Manchester, auf einer der Außenwände des Filmtheaters. Die Länge von 35 Metern erlaubt es dem Betrachter die Szene physisch abzuspielen, zu pausieren oder zu zurückzuspulen, in dem er sich diese erwandert. A photo-collage of 75 film frames of one of the longest camera pans in film history, found in J.L. Godards Weekend. A scene that scans an entire countryside traffic jam in a single horizontal movement of more than seven minutes. The resulting collage is a panoramic view of the whole, nonmoving, but nevertheless still containing the ele- ment of time. Commissioned for the exhibition “Unspooling- artists and cinema” at Cornerhouse, Manchester in 2010, installed on one of the side walls outside the Cornerhouse cinema. 75 flyposters 50 x 70 cm generate a width just short of 35 meters, allowing the spectator to physically play, pause, and rewind the scene by walking along.

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2 Sekunden Herbst/2 seconds autumn 2010

Fotocollage aus 57 Einzelbildern, Dimensionen variabel/ Collage of 57 C-prints, dimensions variable Ein filmischer Zoom von etwas mehr als 2 Sekunden, durch Skalierung und Überlagerung zu einem festen Körper verdichtet. A cinematic zoom of slightly more than 2 seconds, an undefined film scene in the woods in autumn, compressed into still image. To preserve its cinematic character the 57 images of the zoom are scaled up appropriately and combined in chronological order. Time extends into the third dimension, turns into relief.

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Erkner 2005

3 min. HD1080p Video, Stereo. Projektion im Loop/Looped projection. Im Medium Film beschreibt die Kamerafahrt den Raum durch die Zeit. Die Arbeit rekonstruiert den zugrundeliegenden Raum in seiner Gesamtheit, in dem sie diesen aus seiner zeitlichen Hülle herausschält. Das resultierende Panorama enthält noch Spuren der Bewegung. In the realm of film a camera pan describes space with the means of time. The camera ́s quite narrow field of vision is enlarged by enchaining several consecutive fields of vision. Erkner aims to reconstruct the described space in its entity, peeling the space out of its temporal container. the result is a panoramic view of the whole. It is almost nonmoving, but nevertheless still contains the element of time. Vorschau/View film:

http://www.zeyen.de/erkner/erkner.html

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Performance Proposal 2006

Live Performance: Ein Kameramann, ein Dollyfahrer, 1 Videoprojektor und Zuspieler auf Schienendolly/Live performance: A camera man. a dolly operator, a video projector and video player on a dolly. Filmversion 60min. HD 1080p Video, Stereo.

Re-Enactment einer Filmszene aus Rainer Werner Fassbinders Film Liebe ist kälter als der Tod. Die Kamerabewegungen werden durch die Simulation der originalen Kamerafahrt neutralisiert, das Filmbild wird zum bewegten Fenster einer statischen Szene. A re-enactment of a film scene in Rainer Werner Fassbinders first movie, a scene with a particular long and artificial moving camera (2 min 30 sec). The camera pan is neutralized by the simulation of its original movement. The film image turns into a moving window onto a static scenery.

Vorschau/View film: http://www.zeyen.de/performance_proposal/performance_proposal.html

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Man/Island 2005

4min 17s. HD 1080p Video. Stereo. Director´s Cut einer dokumentarischen Auftragsarbeit. Die Arbeit zeigt die gesamten Shotlisten in Form von Rolltiteln und entzieht sich so jeder formellen Entscheidung. Der Filmhintergrund deutet auf den Ort des Geschehens, die Insel La Réunion. Man/Island is the director ́s cut version of a commissioned documentary film.The piece is a presentation of the shot lists of the base tapes presented in the form of rolling credits, thus avoiding any editorial decision. The backdrop indicates the films setting, the island La Réunion in the indian ocean. Vorschau/View film:

http://www.zeyen.de/man_island/man_island.html

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About Cinemascope 2004

Lawrence von Arabien/Lawrence of Arabia (die in der Fernsehversion unterdrückten Bereiche/the parts suppressed in the T.V. version)

Farbfoto auf Holzkonstruktion, Dimensionen variable/C-print mounted on wooden construction, dimensions variable.

About Cinemascope heilt die Wunden des Formatkrieges zwischen Kino und

Fernsehen. Die Arbeit wendet sich an Menschen, die mit der Fernsehversion von Cinemascope-Filmen aufgewachsen sind. Sie ergänzt die Erinnerung mit den im Fernsehen abgeschnittenen Bildteilen. About Cinemascope tries to heal the wounds of the format war between cinema and television. It is destined to all those brought up with the televised version of cinemascopic films in an attempt to complement their memory through the display of the suppressed parts. The work complements the T.V. version of David Lean´s Lawrence of Arabia.

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Weiß/White 2002

79 min. PAL Video, Doppelprojektion, Videomischer/Double projection, video mixer.

Im Medium der Malerei trägt eine weiße Leinwand keine Farbe. Bis zum ersten Pinselstrich enthält sie alle noch unrealisierten Malereien. Im Medium Film trägt eine weiße Leinwand die Summe aller Farben. Sie enthält alle unrealisierten Film und alle bereits realisierten Filme. Weiß überlagert Derek Jarman ́s Film Blue mit seinem Negativ (gelb), um einen weißen Film zu erzeugen. In the realm of painting a white canvas does not carry any colour. It contains all unrealized paintings. In the realm of film a white canvas carries all colours. It contains all unrealized films as well as all existing films. White layers Derek Jarman ́s film Blue with its negative (yellow) to obtain a white film.

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*3.04.1968 in Essen, Ruhr Deutschland/Germany Ausbildung 1987/88 Studium der Philosophie an der Universität Essen 1988/89 Studium der Malerei an der Kunstakademie Antwerpen (KASKA) 1989/92 Studium der Malerei an der St.Lukas Kunstakademie Brüssel Stipendien 1993/94 Postgraduat an der Rijksakademie Amsterdam (Master of Art) 1996/97 Fellowship an der Kunsthochschule für Medien (KHM) Köln Preise 1997 Honorary Mention Prix Ars Electronica, Linz 2001 Nominiert für den Medienkunstpreis, ZKM Karlsruhe 2002 Projektförderung Bildende Künste, Berliner Senat 2009 Auszeichnung für “Flashlights” auf dem Blicke Filmfestival, Bochum. Studies 1987/88 studies of philosophy at University Essen 1988/89 studies of painting at art academy Antwerpen (KASKA) 1989/92 studies of painting at St.Lukas art academy Brussels Stipends 1993/94 Postgraduate at Rijksakademie Amsterdam (Master of Art) 1996/97 Fellowship at Kunsthochschule für Medien (KHM) Köln Prizes 1997 Honorary Mention Prix Ars Electronica, Linz 2001 Nomination for the Media Art Award, ZKM Karlsruhe 2002 Project grant visual arts, Senate of Berlin 2009 Award for “Flashlights” at the Blicke Filmfestival.

(auf der nächsten Seite fortgesetzt/to be continued on the next page)

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Ausstellungen/Exhibitions/Festivals (Auswahl/selection) 1996 Von einer Zukunft.. Trinitatiskirche Köln 1997 Inter-Act Lehmbruck-Museum Duisburg 1998 Realismus-Studio NGBK, Berlin 1999 von einem raum Akademie der Künste, Berlin Schnitt Ausstellungsraum Köln 2000 Kunstraum B2, Leipzig Montmartre Portrait, Transition, Berlin 2001 confrontaties De Warande, Turnhout, Belgien Night Visions Museum Ludwig, Köln 2002 Drawing in Motion Forum Stadtpark, Graz Weiss Plattform, Berlin 2003 Just Passing Through bgf_mitte, Berlin Skulptur in Video ZKM Medialounge, Karlsruhe Déplacements (& Histoires Parallèles) Musée d ́Art Moderne (A.R.C.), Paris 2004 Leçons de mémoire (& J.-C. Royoux) Musée du Louvre, Paris 2005 Man_Island, Film Project Musée Léon Dierckx, La Réunion 2006 Canariasmediafest Espacio Digital, Las Palmas, Gran Canaria 2009 “Farewell” 59th Berlinale, Berlin (Premiere) Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen InVideo 2009, Milano “Flashlights” Blicke Filmfestival des Ruhrgebiets 2010 “Unspooling”- Artists and Cinema Cornerhouse, Manchester 2011 A trilogy Studio 56, Espace en Cours, Paris Colportere Film Festival, Bergamo 2012 Transmediale 2012, Berlin 2013 9 ways to say it´s over Inland Offshore, London

ON THE POST-CINEMA

Daniel Miller

Published in the July/August 09 edition of Art Monthly magazine In 2006 the Berlin Berlinale launched the section Forum Expanded to take account of the new forms of cinema which had been developed in video art. As part of their ambition to “show different films differently” organizers installed a black box in the lobby of the Arsenal movie theatre, to accompany a more conventional program projected on the big screen. In 2009, the box showed Stefan Zeyen’s short film Farewell (2009). 1 minute 41 seconds long, repeating in an endless loop, the work showed a woman looking back from the passenger seat of a departing convertible. The camera trains a sharp, steady zoom on the image, so the woman never seems to get further away. Yet the picture quality corrodes as the real distance increases, until the frame decomposes into static and white noise.. “Think of Maria Schneider in “The Passenger (1975),” Anthony Lane wrote after the death of Antonioni in 2007, “kneeling in the back seat of a speeding convertible, turning around, and revelling in the dappled, tree-bowered road that unspools behind her—what finer way to flee your past?” This time it was cinema itself leaving something behind: Zeyen shot Farewell on 35mm film, in a period in which the film industry is switching to video. “I’m never going to go back to film,” David Lynch said following the release of his video-shot Inland Empire. “Film is a beautiful medium, so beautiful, but it’s a dinosaur.... You die the death. It’s unreal slow and you die. I don’t want to die” Asked to explain his film’s rabbit-hole plot, Lynch could only reveal: “It’s about a woman in trouble.” This insistent link between death, film, and women, confirming in the final reel the feminist claim that “woman is the very ground of representation” (Teresa de Lauretis) enjoyed the premier of its inescapable ultimate conclusion some forty years previously, thanks to a man who had earlier stated that all he required in order to make a movie was a girl and a gun. “END OF CINEMA / END OF WORLD” proclaimed the final title of Jean-Luc Godard’s movie Week End (1967), as his bourgeois couple protagonists switched sides in the class-struggle, joining a roving band of revolutionary cannibals. The flesh-eaters served-up a colourful metaphor for Godard’s own artistic strategy. “Godard,” noted Peter Wollen, the co-writer of The Passenger, “treated Hollywood as a kind of conceptual property store

from which he could serendipitously loot ideas for scenes, shots, and moods.” The director, a man once arrested for shoplifting, wasn’t alone in this conceptual kleptomania. The same year that Week End ap- peared in the movie houses, Guy Debord published Society of the Spectacle, the major literary achievement of a roving Situationist movement, which believed in the truth of “the passage of a few persons through a rather brief period of time” and which proposed a strategy of “détournement” against the spectacular “pseudo-world” conjured by capitalism. “It is obviously in the realm of the cinema,” wrote Debord and Gil J Wolman in “A User’s Guide to Détournement” (1956) “that détournement can attain its greatest effectiveness and, for those concerned with this aspect, its greatest beauty.” Fifty-three years later, fourteen months after the fortieth anniversary of May 1968 put the Situationist legacy back on the agenda, and two months after the silver jubilee of the French New Wave was celebrated in London at the British Film Institute, détournement appears dominant in contemporary creative practice. In the era of what American cyberlawyer Larry Lessig calls “remix culture” musicians make records by assembling raided samples, critics write essays by tendentiously combining quotes, novelists generate books by mashing-up other media, and television shows endlessly cite other shows, in a vertiginous spiral of mediation and irony. Analogous processes have always existed. Balzac, the master of immersive simulation (and one-time inventor of the concept of the “screen-woman”) peopled his novels with characters fleshed-out from paintings, while Shakespeare liberally recycled plots from his predecessors. What has changed lately is scale and extension. The supernova of media created by networked computing has opened a black hole in the centre of social space, turning détournement into a survival strategy. It is no longer possible to escape from the mediaindustrial complex, and it remains undesirable to submit to it. What to do? Web-ensnared knowledge-workers, hooked-into the net through their jobs, and their jobs through their networks, report feel- ing alienated from their currently-not-online colleagues. The first group has started to live in a landscape of memes, lulz and virals; the second group struggles for breath in the whirlwind (the shitstorm). This brave new dimension of human incomprehension (intensified by analogous divisions elsewhere) represents the reverse side of humanity’s massively amplified new communications capacity. The problem is simultaneously superficial and radical. Anchored by the eternal maxim of spectacular alienation (“Have you seen this?”) it dissolves in silence and subtler patterns of speech, which evade footnotes in favour of more intricate movements.

“What is it ultimately that makes one run a shot on or change to another?” asks Godard. Launching Inland Empire in California in 2007, David Lynch read from the Aitareya Upanishad: “We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe.” The universe as a web, in an age of webs, like the clockwork universe deduced by Isaac Newton, in an age of mechanical clocks. Like an internet image-board, or an sequence of YouTube videos surfed automatically (à la Andre Breton), Inland Empire stitched together patches from half-conceptualized concepts, obsessions and signs of distress to create a work that the critic Nathan Lee characterized with a term borrowed from the Rochlitz-born media theorist Friedrich A. Kittler: information-system. According to Lee, Lynch’s film (along with David Fincher’s cool urban procedural Zodiac, Richard Kelly’s execrable Southland Tales, and David Simon’s seminal DVD-format series The Wire) constitutes a new form of system-based storytelling for a new media age. According to Kittler “the general digitization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media” and provokes an equivalent integration in aesthetic/conceptual software. As optical fibre networks transform formerly distinct data flows “into a standardized series of digitized numbers” a principle of infinite mediation is ingrained in reality. Every coordinate point in the universe comes to rub-up against every other. The result is less the death of cinema than its apotheosis. “A face in close-up,” notes Dennis Porter, “is what before the age of film only a lover or a mother ever saw.” In the golden era of film, the sight remained restricted to the sacred spaces of movie houses. But as sensors and screens have proliferated, cinematic intimacy has become pervasive. Cheap recording equipment has augmented media vision; tethered information appliances, like iPhones especially, have rerouted supply lines. The result is a world that is simultaneously a film set and a screening room, flooded with images, ripped from their contexts. This is the world of the image-file, born from the womb of pornography. Following the introduction of consumer video equipment in the eighties, and the subsequent triumph of the porno-friendly format VHS over its technically-superior rival Betamax (the one beat-off the other...), the industry experienced the destruction of its traditional distribution model: In 1970 there were 900 adult movie theatres in America; seventeen years later, only 200 remained. In a crucial mutation in social space, pregnant with incalculable consequences, pornography abandoned the city (the polis) and penetrated the living room (the oikia). Consumer tastes individualized and spread into long-tails; audiences particularized. “Every advance in technology,” notes the critic Dana Stevens, “has had the

effect of isolating consumers of culture from one another: Movies took us away from live actors, video took us away from other filmgoers, and now iThings are depriving us even of our fellow couch potatoes.” The crucial new pieces of prosthetics was the remote control. The new forms of interaction which the device facilitated (rewind, fast-forward, pause) cycled back into production, transforming its narrative values. The compilation, a primitive information-system which anticipated the interminable links of review articles which appear on websites like Bookforum, achieved mass-market dominance; according to the documentary Pornography: A Secret History of Civilization (1999): “Of the almost 9000 new titles released in 1998, compilations account for almost two thirds.” The disintegration of blue movies into series of sexual numbers ran in parallel to the shattering of grand narratives in the radical academy. Under the red lights, and on seminar-room OHPs, pornography and theory both came to embrace, more-or-less simultaneously smaller, more singular, more tactical units. Meanwhile Godard responded as well. In the words of Peter Wollen, the director “abandoned the centre, breaking down his narrative into a mosaic of micro-elements.” As discourse networks upgraded and conquered the mainstream, these developments became live. From RedTube to YouTube, the internet now proposes a cinema of clips: mobile, hybrid, and elemental, sometimes urban-dystopian (“bus uncle”) and sometimes symbolically rich (“boy throwing a remote control through TV screen”). And beyond the relative calm of the video districts, even smaller units are circulating. On imageboards like 4chan, memes built from an image and a few snatches of text shoot round the planet in minutes, trailing psycho-dramatic sparks (“lulz”) as they go. The fact that the most widely-known type of these memes remains lolcats is a striking coincidence, given the status enjoyed by this animal in the history of film: “As is well-known,” writes Jacques Rancière, “the cat is the fetish animal of dialecticians of the cinema, from Sergei Eisenstein to Chris Marker – the animal that converts one idiocy into another, consigning triumphant reasons to stupid superstitions or the enigma of a smile.” “The film has enriched our field of perception,” wrote Walter Benjamin in 1936. “By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film... extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule of our lives... [and] manages to assure of us of an immense and unexpected field of action.” In the teeth of continuing bien pensant criticism, (criticism cinema also faced) the internet has performed the same service with respect to psychology.

“Fifty years ago,” noted Benjamin, “a slip of the tongue passed more or less unnoticed.” Even five years ago, feelings of hostility, contempt, derision, envy, vanity, boredom, fear, sexual desire or aversion, plus a great deal of simple self-absorption (“material,” writes Thomas Nagel, “that everyone who has been around knows is there”) which internet blogs and message boards now duly record remained concealed beneath politesse and reserve. What has changed is the fact that this stuff is now exposed, and this should be celebrated as offering new opportunities. If there is hope, it lies in the trolls. In 1936 Benjamin separated progressive “exhibition value” from reactionary cult-value; where the former facilitated a relationship of “testing” by encouraging an audience to identify with the camera, the latter instilled a logic of reverence and authority, through exclusionary rhetoric and manipulative rituals. In a conference paper published in March 2009, George Washington political scientists Eric Lawrence, John Sides, Henry Farrell identified the contemporary strain of this tendency: “blog authors tend to link to their ideological kindred and blog readers gravitate to blogs that reinforce their existing viewpoints. Both sides of the ideological spectrum inhabit largely cloistered cocoons of cognitive consonance, thereby creating little opportunity for a substantive exchange across partisan or ideological lines.” “Anything shot anyhow,” is how Jean-Pierre Melville (who played the novelist Parvulesco in Breathless) once summarized, apparently negatively, Godard’s artistic approach. In Week End (“a film adrift in the cosmos”, “a film found on a scrap-heap”) the director cut together (in the words of Craig Keller) “the themes of class struggle, environmentalism, body-politics, commercialization, and the very end of civilization itself” in a story of cross-purposes, clashes and unexpected exposures. It was Godard’s striking ability to pull these strands together – no simple matter – which constituted his singular genius. Put in different terms, Godard was the master of structure. “At the end of this director’s career,” the painter and critic Manny Farber predicted of Godard in Artforum in 1968, “there will probably be a hundred films, each one a bizarrely different species, with its own excruciatingly singular skeleton, tendons, plumage.” The political hopes which engagé intellectuals – Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Godard himself – invested in cinema in the twentieth century comes down to the fact that cinema and politics share a common trajectory, as arts of constructing narratives through associations and scenes, dissociations and jumpcuts. “Fragmentation, interval, cutting, collage, montage,” Rancière summarizes, “what is involved is revealing one world behind another... organizing a clash, presenting the strangeness of the familiar, in order

to reveal a different order of measurement that is only uncovered by the violence of a conflict.” In his masterpiece Histoire(s) du Cinema, originally filmed for French television, and released on DVD in 2007, Godard recounts a story of successive assassinations: the sound film destroying silent film, Hollywood betraying its greatest artists, cinema sacrificed on the altar of commerce. Yet this is not the whole story: as Craig Keller notes for the website Senses of Cinema, the bracketed “s” in the work’s title was intended to indicate other possible stories that might have been, and which still remain possible. There is no single history, and no standard index, no meta-language controlling the relationships between text and images, or between texts and texts. In this sense the problem remains as it was. “It is because this time for real,” Godard intones over the Histoire(s) voicetrack “the only veritable popular art form rejoins painting. That is: art. That is: what is reborn from what is burned.” What survives is a slogan Godard displays on a supertitle: “Let Every Eye Negotiate For Itself.” “Red lips turn to white noise,” writes Kittler, “erotics to stochastics.” Then turns back. ** Daniel Miller lives in Germany.

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