Weird Studies/Courses/Kubrick
25 Jun 2024 - 25 Jun 2024
- About | All is Full of Love a JFM course. I expect I'll enjoy this one more than Weird Studies/Courses/AI because I actually have more to learn, whereas on AI I have to argue with everything. My takes on Kubrick are pretty standard; I have a feeling JFM's is more original, whether or not I buy it.
- Kubrick
- A Clockwork Orange
- Kubrick has a cold eye and his movies tend to revolve around people whose agency is sapped by inimical systems (I think that covers Dr Strangelove, Barry Lyndon, Clockwork Orange , The Shining, Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket, and to some extent 2001 although there it is balanced out by Clarke's optimism).
- Saw Kubrick exhibit at SF Jewish Museum in 2016, that was pretty awesome
- Minsky/Kubrick
- Realized that the human-trapped-in-iniimical-systemes theme is also in PKD which seems obvious in retrospect...surely this connection has been made? Notes and Correspondences: 77
- Notes
- Lecture 1
- early JFM essau: The Kubrick Gaze | Reality Sandwich
What you see in a Kubrick film is the conscious manifestation of an unconscious play of forces taking place beneath the celluloid surface. Kubrick is more concerned with psychic forces – archetypal, philosophical and cosmic – than he is with the emotional life of his characters or the diversion of his audience.
- K still photography
- Nabokov quote from Think, Write, Speak – dislocations
- Deleuze – diff&rep – undo dicntomies universal/particular temporal/atemporal – interesting
- fixing plato
- realism and formalism – both belieeve in objective reality
- hm?
- Office Hours 1
- viewed after the fact. Nice crowd. Monolith appeared in FMJ? Kubrick disclaims connections.
- Love vs coldness. Kubrickian love more like agape. JFM reading Spinoza and detects Spinozist acceptance in Kubrick.
- Lecture 2
- Nature of all the connections in Kubricks films. Whether intentional or not is somewhat secondary.
- Modernity as contingency. post WWII, even non-theistic ideologies seem contingent. (Note: I suppose this is all obvious to me, I grew up in this era)
- "contingency is the subordination of all ontologies" – fundamental unknowability. Man feels like an exile... I have some quibbles here but fuck me.
- I feel post-absurd. Like, Sartre etc are sill mourning god, I am beyond that (my generation).
- JFM: it is a bit of a platitude (but wasn't in 2000?)
- this seems like pure postmodernism, sigh, boring.
- Kubrick playboy interview
- fear of death, was just talking about that.
- Enter Deleuze. Paralysis of the film noir hero (Chinatown). The time image as cure (???)
Brutalism
- The Brutalism Post, Part 2: What Brutalism is Not | McMansion Hell
- from cat c, not JFM
- Christopher Alexander as the opposte of Brutalism
- Quote Blake's Tyger on symmetry
- Office Hours 2
- Deleuze,
- Brutalism (should read up more).
- Banam: Aquinas supposed beauty quod vicem placet (that which seen pleases). But in brutalism image: <latin> that which seen, perturbs. But sadnes and joy are predigested; a brute artwork will evoke something that does not have a template.
- Every terror is unique in Spinoza. Singularity of bodies.
- The inside and outside of a brutalist building are topologically continuous.
- Something about the imaginal but not sure how it connects.
- Topics: CA, the opposite of brutalism, almost reactionary
- Jason, Kubricon.
- Kubrick:film : Brutalists:concrete
- Kubrick films as sketches, treatments of "real" film.
- Units, central ideas.
- One-pont perspective makes a rectangulare space, thus monolith
- vettcality: transcendence, horizontality: immanence, the cross is where they meet in the human.
- once camera penetrates the monolith (at the end of 2001) all the rest of the films are within the monolith (???)
- Kubrick likes midpoints, this is the one for the corpus
- Time crystals (OK I want to push back against this, so he has two similar shots, does that mean he has some grand scheme or he just repeats himself? Oh well I'll shut up)
- Q re McLuhan, Kubrick as reinventing film as medium. McLuhan very religious, went to mass every day.
- Spinoza as uniquely generating a philosophy of pure immanence (Deleuze). Should read Ethics, apparently. Some stuff on emotion. Kubrick a Hobbesian on the surface and a Spinozist underneath.
- Paul Zinno reading Techgnosis
- Sculptor Robert Irwin
- Tom Manning cartoonist (should check out)
- Spielberg though the eyes of a child, Kubrick's is inhuman (and monocular)
- Lec 3 (got there late)
- Contingency. Have to say I don't quite get this, but he means "lack of solid foundations" basically.
- Kubrick creating light in the darkness
- Deleuze: nobody just makes a film, tehre is always a problem to be solved (that sounds surprisingly functionalist). Needs urgency
- Kubrick always transcended (examined) the genre he was working in.
- Kubrick created a persona which is at the center of each film.
- Fractal and modular (non-submersible units)
- Office Hours 3
- Decalogue Krizlowsky. Kubrick wrote preface
- I managed to ask a question about: 2001 Ending, novelization
- Only feel a little bit like an idior
- Jewish filmmakers, moral without being moralistc (so appear amoral). Coens and Kubrick
- Hal and Bowman both revert to infancy. Daisy lyrics significane
- Patricia Pisters the neuro-image (?)
- "It's not what the monolith means (or represents), its what it contains" – Kubrick to antonio.
- JFM: its the imaginal stupid. OK.
- Somebody in chat mentioned Signifying Nothing which I should reread re nihilism
- Lec 4
- Review of contingency, a term I dislike but I know what he's talking about. Citing Charles Taylor. Relativism on spiritual plane. And moral plane.
- Kubrick was reacting to that. Trying to make something singular (I don't quite see why that is a reaction to contingency)
- Problems and ratiocination.
- The emergent method is circular. Film tends to turn around a center. Often in the exact temporal middle. At that point, narrative folds in on itself.
- In Barry Lyndon, its the kiss.
- "a cyclopean eye looking at a human ritual for the first time"
- Kubrick goes from indivduals to puppets
- 2nd half of Full Metal Jacket, dialog is all cliches (huh)
- Logic of representation is problematic in art
- Tarkovsky, Malik (Lynch) trying to show us the transcendence, they are iconophilic? cataphatic Kubrick refuses to film this (other than monolith). He doesn't depict, he is apophatic.
- Pushing the immanent frame until it breaks (releasing or revealing the transcendent)
- Kubrick is of the brain, not the mind (?). His materialism includes the imaginal (yay) but he is committed to "taking the modern is true and seeing what happens". The WS saying "we aren't modern enough".
- The world contains the brain and vv, in a crystal blah blah blah.
- The circle is an entirely negative force in Kubrick, it traps us in the immanent frame. Every circle is viscious
- Influenced by Ophuls La Ronde.
- Reminded of The Circle Game and The Wheel. And the Buddhist wheel of samsara.
- Lang, Hitchcock also had themes of dark systemic forces, with a center wheel. The Shining, the hotel is the wheel of american society.
- Kubrick politics is downstream from metaphysics, and he's an extreme anarchist. Against the order of being. He was obsessed by the 18th century...because that is the moment when we crossed over into the immanent frame.
- Wow JFM is a consicousness eliminationist??? Not quite. But he is a Spinozist.
- Office Hours 4
- Kubrick depicts ontologicl levelling (from Kierkegaard) but also the remainder, that which can't be leveled.
- All art is the spiritual reasserting itself into the secular ref Eagelton on aesthetics
- Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as educator
- genius and divination
- The groundwork for magic class has something tos ay about the moden and beyond
- Galeleio --> Kant --> Deus Irae
- to be modern enough is to – realizing the modern project presupposes a world of meaning that pre-exists us... sounds like BS to me. reaffirming the divine nature, science has a sacred dimension (OK, I agree with him but get there in a different way, maybe?)
- Lec 5
- Back to circles
- Nietzsche Schopenhauer, circularity
- Against the idea that Becoming is hip, being is unhip
- Circular causal mechanisms, incl spirals and feedback loops (he doesn't really understand those)
- identity and AGENCY are fully determined by your position within the circuitry of the system. Everyone is a puppet (a clockwork orange). An automaton that believes itself to be free.
- Automatism. Long history in cinema, eg German Expressionism (Murnau, Lang, etc)
- Freud to Skinner to Sapolsky (!),
- In Kubrick movies everyone is a Golem, the universe is a neurological prison
- the automatism should come alive without external intervention (god).
- KDK12 in The Shining is "Kubrick". OK. Reflection in helmet in 2001 (moon monolith scene)
- The characters in a movie are being manipulated by a "supernatural" being (the artist, outside the system)
- The magician is a sign of radical contingency
- Jean Epstein, filmmaker and wrote The Intelligence of a Machine 1946
- The relation between creator and creation is not causal, its some other thing.
- precausal, synchronicity...the synchronistic event breaks the circle. the event refuses to be reduced to an it.
- Torrance in the picture is an escape? I thought that was a circle...
- One miracle makes everything contingent, liberates blah blah blah
- If its outside the frame, it can't be an it (because then it would be an it).
- Radical mystery. Thou is outside the frame.
- Duns scotus and leveling of being
- Kubrick as creator loves every aspect of his worlds.
- Kleist, loving us in our puppethood...
- Office Hours 5
- Bergson, Deleuze, Time Crystals, deja vu (in Kubrick, reflections, echoing)
- A real person made to act as a puppet.
- Spinoza, spiritual automaton (also in Deleuze on film)
- Roger Scruton, The Face of Love (JFM's fave conservative philosopher)
- Nathan on the 3 bodies of the buddah...
- Readings
- The Blue Hotel
The huge arms of the wind were making attempts – mighty, circular, futile – to embrace the flakes as they sped