The Two Lessons (At the Moving Picture Show)

By Will Carleton, published in The Motion Picture Magazine in 1911:

Near the ne-er-lifted curtain we sat, clasping hands,

And awaited the coming of seas and of lands,

And of forests whose branches bore fruits of surprise,

Springing forth - leafy miracles - plain in our eyes;

And of cities that glistened in wealth-laden camps,

As if fifty Aladdins were there with their lamps;

And the women and children and men! who, tho small

To the objects around them were greatest of all.

There were those that came out of the mansion's rich gates,

Or that nursed in the hovels their loves and their hates;

There were sailors who courted the sea, foul or fair,

There were birdmen who swam thru the treacherous air;

There were people from all of the corners of earth,

With their comedies, tragedies, sorrows and mirth;

Tho they gave us no sound, tho they spoke not a word,

All they said that was worthy the hearing, was heard.

There was nought that seemed waiting the wizard's command,

All the world to us came, at the touch of a hand.

Still, no treasure that white-stretching canvas would win,

But could fade out as something that never had been.

So I asked, as we came from the dusk-sheltered spot,

"That was surely a picture of life, was it not?

"There is nothing that winsome or lovely may seem,

"But may fade like a vision, and die like a dream."

"Yes, 'tis life acted over," she blithesomely said,

"For it shows there is nothing on earth, that is dead;

"Nought we wish, if our efforts no energy lack,

"But howe'er it may vanish, may some time come back."

Interiorview

Hey Gemma, I've noticed that you've been pretty quiet on your blog of late.

Yes, I haven't even looked at it for about a month. I've been very stressed writing the introductory chapter for my thesis, and so I cut out all potential distractions.

Surely a few minutes on a blog wouldn't make much difference?

You'd be surprised. I still like reading other people's blogs, and so when I've had a spare moment that's what I've done. But I'm a slow writer and I often like writing longer posts, so I just decided not to. I think I made the right decision - I have a lot more free time again now.

How do you feel about your chapter, now that you're working on the next one?

Well, Chapter One is finished for now, but I know that I'll probably need to rewrite it at the end of the PhD - after all, it is the introductory section. I might end up entirely removing the section on film-induced tourism as postmodern practice, but at the moment I just need to bury it for a few months. I'm so happy to be working on a new chapter now... yes, so happy!

Can you briefly tell me about this chapter?

Hmmm. Well I am historicising film-induced tourism in this chapter, focussing on the post World War Two era and the birth of the leisure industry. The Mike Todd film Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) is a useful text here for the chapter's organisation, mainly because it allows me to make productive connections between modernity (the birth of tourism and cinematic technologies) and postmodernity, through its dialogue with the Jules Verne novel that was serialised in the 1870s.

That sounds really interesting!

[She reddens]. Oh, thanks! Yes, the more that I research this topic the more interested I become. But I feel this intense need to just write the thing now. I feel so incredibly behind.

You know, everybody who is writing a PhD says that.

But in my case it is true!! Really, it is! I need to use this panic to force me into swift writing now.

Why have you had so much trouble during the initial writing of your PhD?

A number of reasons, but it comes down to the fact that your self is really your worst enemy.

Should I feel offended by this?

You know what I mean. I kept feeling like I wasn't quite good enough for the project, that I wouldn't be able to do the topic justice. Everything that I wrote looked like childish scratchings on sand at the beach, and just as easy to wipe out again. To continue the metaphor, time was the encroaching and inevitable water. So I started and restarted, and felt that I would never finish. It was an awful feeling.

But a necessary feeling to experience, nonetheless?

Absolutely. A lot of people have tried to give me advice about how to handle my PhD - I've been to student-designed sessions and all - and so I've been aware of the rights and wrongs for a long while. And yet, and yet... I couldn't help but make the same mistakes I was told not to make. For me, I needed to learn by doing everything wrong first, a real trial by (mis)fire. Lacan was right when he wrote that experience is not didactic.

It all sounds very dramatic.

And yet the lack of action made it feel like the opposite of drama. But, perhaps I may have felt a need to narrativise the whole process, adding trials as a way of making the denouement all the more exciting. How very English department of me. Or perhaps I need to think this now - of cause and subsequent effect - because it becomes a way of justifying my period of relative inactivity. I need to function with the end in mind.

Speaking of endings...

Yes, I'll finish the sentence for you: speaking of endings, there must be an end.

Love Of Ruins

Earlier in the week, I was checking my email in my department's postgraduate common room when I noticed that an old built-in drawer in the room seemed slightly ajar. I opened it up further, and discovered that inside the unlocked drawer were various remains from European and Middle Eastern antiquity - tile fragments from Phrygian mosaics, Etruscan stoneware, a broken vase, the crumbled remains of a knitting nancy. All ruins, but how had I never noticed that they were here before? I was excited by what I had found, and told a senior academic in my department, who brought up the keys to the other (locked) drawers, and then discovered two more drawers of antiquities - one drawer containing beautiful Egyptian turquoise jewellery and figurines and even a carved scarab beetle. And wonderful hand-written letters written to the university from around 1913. It was amazing. They would have made a tidy sum on ebay, although my thoughts lay closer to: these items belong in a museum!

It turned out that the Classics department used to own the floor, and they had just never bothered to take away all their things when they moved out. Some other postgrads had known about the items for months and years, so it wasn't like I was the first to discover them, just the first to actually bother telling someone else about them. I think that the Classics department have taken the items back now, where no doubt they will be locked up and forgotten about in another chest of drawers!

It is fitting that I find these crumbled ruins as I continue to make ruins of my own through my writing (this article by Cornelia Vismann draws the connection between language and ruins, she writes that philology can be etymologically described as a "love of ruins"). As my thesis continues to take shape, it leaves behind even more remains that will hopefully be recycled back into the project at a later point. Here's the beginning of a chapter that no longer exists, a kind of a requiem for an introduction. It is on the discursive connection between cinema and tourism, using Benjamin writing about, well, ruins. I wrote it around a month ago:

Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our
railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly.
Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the
tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris,
we calmly and adventurously go travelling.1

In the passage above, Benjamin’s words, from his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” indicate the longevity of a discursive tradition in continental critical theory connecting travel with cinema. Here, Benjamin radically turns about the usual paradigm of the modern world as a milieu liberated from the temporal and spatial constraints of the ancien regime. Although the urban industrial world has been associated with imprisonment and monotony since Blake and his “satanic mills”, Benjamin also sees the urban architectural markers of the modern real world that are so often associated with speed, action and novelty – the taverns and the streets - representing stasis, quagmire, non-movement. In this imagining, even railroad travel does not take one where one would want to visit: he focusses on the station(ary) and enclosure rather than on the train itself.2 It is only cinema, a passive activity held in a darkened, enclosed interior space, that Benjamin privileges as the paradoxical apparatus enabling “adventurous” exploration, a way of escape for people from all levels of society. This phantasmagoria of the modern world may be constructed from destruction and loss, but this debris is effaced, unrecognised. In an example of the ambivalence that characterises so many of Benjamin’s thoughts about his era, the idea of travelling through “far flung ruins and debris” simultaneously evokes two images: in the first instance, with some sense of exigency, there is the image of those who unwittingly tread on what they cannot see (hence the “calmness” in the midst of this destruction); secondarily, it conjures up an almost Romantic vision of the original grand tourists in Europe who visited and traversed the crumbling buildings of the classical world for pleasure. Thus, travel and cinema are intrinsically connected: modern tourism begins with the love of ruins, and as Benjamin notes, the cinema cannot help but create new ruins of its own.3

1. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zorn. London: Pimlico, 1999. p.229.
2. Given the subsequent events of World War II and the uses given to mass train transportation in Europe, these words seem tragically prescient.
3. Jacques Derrida writes on Benjamin’s ambivalence in a famous passage: “One could write, maybe with or following Benjamin, maybe against Benjamin, a short treatise on the love of ruins. What else is there to love, anyway? One cannot love a monument, a work of architecture, an institution as such except in an experience itself precarious in its fragility: it has not always been there, it will not always be there, it is finite. And for this very reason one loves it as mortal, through its birth and its death, through one’s own birth and death, through the ghost or the silhouette of its ruin, one’s own ruin—which it already is, therefore, or already prefigures. How can one love otherwise than in this finitude? Where else would the right to love, even the love of law, come from?” See Derrida, J. “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority.” Cardozo Law Review, Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. 11:5-6 (1990): pp.920-1045.

I cannot really use this paragraph any more because I decided against a specific theoretical chapter on "virtual tourism," choosing instead to incorporate sections of it into other chapters on actual, film-induced tourism. So, I demolish my work in the hope that it will provide the foundations for something far stronger in the future, although my fear is that it will become part of a mound of forgotten ideas that will need to be excavated in order to be of any value for me. You should see how many copies of earlier drafts lie waiting for me on my desk.

Touring Claude Lane

Claude Lane - one of the San Francisco locations used by Hitchcock in Vertigo (courtesy of Vertigo...Then And Now). The whole film is an appropriate metaphor for the ambivalence of my study situation and life at the moment - full of enclosed and claustrophobic spaces on one hand, pushed against vertiginous heights, reeling, perhaps falling, as I try to put things into sense (or sentences). Even last night I thought the chapter I was working on seemed straightforward - only to realise this morning that I had wandered into another conceptual laneway: large sections were just alleys of words, that if salvalgable, will be demoted to footnotes...

Anyway, forgive me for not being around lately - I have been very busy!

On Bliss

“For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils."

In anticipation of reading Anne Friedberg's forthcoming monograph The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, I've been considering the connections/differences between older and newer visual virtual frames (which, as I've said before, was one of the central impetuses for starting this blog in the first place, because it aids me in historicising the concept of film-induced tourism). My most recent thoughts relate the computer screen, the Picturesque and tourism into a particular line of flight. This has come about largely due to talks with friends and my new job. Lately, I've been doing some casual office work for a digital imaging company, and in-between tasks - more vacantly than pensively! - I often find myself sitting in front of my PC staring at its standard desktop wallpaper "Bliss" (for Microsoft Windows XP), which shows serene green hills, a deep blue sky and fluffy white clouds. The hill in the foreground is dappled with cloud shadow and what you can't see in the detail of the image (above) are the tiny daffodils dotted in the foreground and some distant purple mountains in the background. This type of imagery (and the colour scheming of green and blue) is very typical for Microsoft, of course, tying in with that 1990s new media aesthetic of freedom, en plein air, travel and open-mindedness - where would you like to go to today?- that Tom Frank has written so clearly about before.

With my thesis topic in mind, the other day a friend was talking to me about the tourism potential of the "Bliss" landscape - he had heard that this image was now a sought-after tourism destination. I tried to research this tip, but unfortunately I couldn't find very much information about it at all, I couldn't even establish whether the photo is real, hyper-real, or a composite of the two... The most I could find on a real-life Bliss location was Microsoft's New Zealand webpage offering their own rather cute "Kiwi-style" variants of Bliss available to download, using an image of a hill from North Otago dotted with sheep (in the winter shot, the sheep are wearing scarves).

So, no real "film tourism" link, but it's made me think about the prominence of the Picturesque in tourism more generally. Bliss is literally taken right out of Wordsworth (so the visual answer to Where would you like to go to today? is I wandered lonely as a cloud...). Wordsworth's site of inspiration was, of course, the Lake District in Northern England that remains a Pictureseque tourism destination (and a literary tourism one), photographed time and time again in very similar ways. I was delighted to find that one person on a personal homepage accompanied by numerous blissful photographs of the region even makes a reference t0 my blogsake, the Claude Glass:

"The north top is still rough and trackless but it is well worth the extra effort to visit this superb vantage point. I have accumulated a fair bit of evidence of historic access to this hill. Apparently it was one of the seven 'stations' around Derwentwater which were visited by Victorian tourists. It was the custom to turn one's back on the scene and view it through a convex mirror, a Claude Glass, to better appreciate its artistic qualities."

A thought: proto-photographic technologies such as the Claude Glass (it's also been called the Claude Lorraine Glass) created an image, but it was particularly ephemeral one - unless you decided to sit down and paint out the image in front of you, you could not take it home and look at it afterwards and fetishize it the way that you could with a photograph, it would have to remain a part of what Wordsworth calls the "inward eye." You had to be there - it was exclusive, you could not show it to distant friends. And yet the Claude Glass still shares one feature that allies it with our most recent photographic development - both the Claude Glass and the modern digital camera allow the viewer to see the final image at the place of origin..

We can at least say that Microsoft's "Bliss" continues the long tradition of the Picturesque and also a technological process that has its origins in the 18th century - it is a virtual Claude Glass too!

Very Film + Tourism

This afternoon I was fortunate enough to meet up with Chris Mayer from Australian Film Locations and speak with him about the pragmatics of scouting for film locations both within Australia and overseas. Chris started his (Sydney-based) company in the early 1990s, and has noticed a considerable expansion of the film locations industry since that time. It was fascinating to hear so much about the locations industry from a person working within it, and I learned a lot about an area that is often difficult to find any written information about.

And today I noticed another film + tourism connection (a TV one, this time). On my way to the meeting on a creepingly-slow tram from South Yarra to St Kilda, I noticed a number of large billboards promoting the Very GC tourism campaign for for the Gold Coast. Of course, this newly abbrieviated name for the Gold Coast (with its Valley Girl connotations of "very") is a rather particular reference to the popular US teen show The OC - indeed, there is no disguising the key demographic that this campaign is marketing towards. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, in the "key industries" page, we find that the "Creative Industry" is listed as one of the region's key industries. To quote from the webpage:

Australia's Gold Coast inspires creative industries.

It must be in the water.

Or the city’s sense of innovation. Or the sense of possibility, of vision and accomplishment.

Whatever the reason, Australia’s Gold Coast draws creative people – and now operates a thriving industry with film, music performance, recording and production.

Academy Award winning film professionals John Cox and Peter Frampton are based within the Gold Coast. Gold Coast City has 75% of the value of Queensland’s film and television drama production with its wide choice of locations, broadband communications, cost savings and production and post-production facilities.

Gold Coast universities and colleges foster creative talent with music, multimedia and theatrical training courses. Events also draw on creative talent with the Gold Coast Film Festival, In the Bin Short Film Festival while Gold Coast hosts the Australian international movie convention.

Real life, Very GC.

In actual fact, it is not just a tourism campaign so much as it is a lifestyle campaign - the "people" of The GC are apparently "alive", "savvy", "open" and "motivated." The web page also tells us that younger Australians migrate to the Gold Coast a lot. The cartoon illustrations (reminiscent of Tiki artist Shag)celebrate cafe culture, palm trees and the beach. Interestingly, cartoon pictures compete with real photographs for prominence on the site - maybe because photographs cannot approximate the fantasy-scape of the television-film connections that are being forged? Finally, this injunction to the reader:

Visit Australia’s Gold Coast and meet the locals. You may even become one.

Perhaps.

This time it's personal...

I have little time for much blog writing at the moment, but the response on Glen's page about writing in a personal style and the business of blogging has prompted me into making a few brief comments here of my own. First of all, I was extremely surprised that Glen received attack for referring to the concept of the "personal is political" as if it was a defunct concept, no longer relevant or worthy of attention in contemporary culture or in academic writing. It is even more important precisely because this characterises a lot of what is being written in academia in the moment. This informative article by Anne Brewster in the most recent edition of Australian Humanities Review provides a sound definition for the undeniable growth of what has been named the "personal turn":

"The personal turn can be seen as part of a trajectory, from the 1980s onwards, of the humanities and social sciences's growing interest in experience and memory, especially that of minoritarian constituencies—such as working class subcultures, women, youth, and racial and ethnic minorities. During the 1980s and 1990s there was also an expansion of writing investigating renovated ethnographical methodologies, which sought to develop new ethical practices of embodied knowledge production. Some of the work in this broad field drew on personal narratives in an effort to deconstruct the binaries between public and private memory, between 'objective' and subjective modes of discourse and between specialized knowledges and everyday life."

It's a trajectory that comes straight from post-structuralism, and perhaps especially (at least, with regard to Australian feminist fictocritical experiments) from the psych et po movement in Paris in the 1970s, writers such as Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva. A lot of what I'm reading for my thesis at the moment fits into this "personal turn" Brewster specifies, and at the moment this means the interdisciplinary work that has been published on travel and cinema taken from such fields as feminism psychoanalysis cinema geography architecture tourism history anthropology, books that include Giuliana Bruno's wonderfully-written Atlas of Emotion and Sam Rohdie's work on geography, modernism and cinema, Promised Lands, that I have blogged about before. Such works are quick to establish connections between the tour and the personal - in both texts mentioned, the "tour" becomes the central organising structure. Perhaps the popularity of the personal in these texts is partly because form and content align and so it is a narratological strategy that allows an alternative, non-linear "tour" against the usual paradigms of cinema studies and tourism studies that are most often inappropriate on their own for thinking through and developing any new, rupturing concepts.

For me, one of the most interesting aspects about the rise of blog culture is that it fits neatly into this trajectory of the personal turn in academic writing. If academic blogs start to become more and more common as they certainly seem to be becoming so, and if they continue to inspire more "personal" (I keep wanting to use quotation marks here) styles of writing, then of course this prevalence in turn will begin to raise a whole new set of questions about the political or ethical value of utilising and sustaining such personal discourses. If one can currently posit that the personal voice in intellectual writing still provokes speculation upon the current epistemological practices of culture and society because of its ability to textually defamiliarise (a concept that Brewster touches upon and one that remains a concept of eternal return for almost all of my thoughts on politics and writing), what happens when the shock of this style wears off? If the personal voice is thoroughly absorbed or integrated into academic writing, will the personal simply become part of the latest form of self-promotion? Then again, whatever meaning is currently attached to this idea of the "personal" is unstable and is likely to reformulate, and so there is a further question that needs to be asked: if blog writing and the personal voice become commonplace, what indeed will the personal become?

Anyway, enough unanswerable questions for now - I meant it about not having much time to write at the moment! But to finish, anyone who hasn't read it already should read this article by Ian Cook that I'm very grateful to my lovely housemate for discovering and passing on to me on the weekend. Cook began to write his doctorate in Geography at Bristol University that was "supposed to trace connections between the retailing of one kind of fresh tropical fruit which was being sold by the major British supermarket chains in the early 1990s," which ended up turning into an autobiographical account of the process of writing his dissertation and the pitfalls of the British academic establishment. This article (the director's cut!) shows us how very brave and political the process of combining the personal with academic writing can still be.

Muffled Screams (or not)

The MUFF (Melbourne Underground Film Festival) is on at the moment and on Saturday night I went to see Jim Van Bebber's 2004 film The Manson Family at Dendy which was also attended by the delightfully inebriated director (complete with an American accent totally reminiscent of The Dude). I really enjoyed the film, except...I was expecting to be really shocked and frightened by it, but I wasn't. Perhaps I've become desensitized to violent imagery in films (although one throat-slitting scene was a little disturbing), but I guess even Van Bebber acknowledges his constraint, as we see in his interview with DVD Talk:

DVD Talk: And yet there are a lot of critics who complain about the sex and violence in the film. But that's the point, isn't it?

JVB: Absolutely. Look, if you're going to tell this story, why shortcut the truth? This story is NC-17. Life is not all R rated. Life is not a PG-13. And certainly, if you're going to discuss these guys and tell the truth, it's obviously going to be NC-17.

DVD Talk: Still, you can hear people saying "well, he's just doing it for a marketing hook - or he wants to appeal to the gorehounds..."

JVB: Exactly. Look, all I can tell them is read the text. Actually, they should congratulate me on how much I restrained myself.

DVD Talk: Is (the sex and violence) perhaps one of the reasons why, 37 years later, we are still fascinated by this case?

JVB: Probably. I mean, it was so appalling. We've had Jim Jones...the Heaven's Gate cult...we've had David Koresh...but just for the sheer insanity...and the sex and the drug use...and I mean, you know, it's the late 60s. It's Hollywood. And I mean, you know, Manson did rub shoulders with a lot of people: Neil Young, Stephen Stills, Dennis Wilson. And so it gets pretty crazy. He was smart...and talented. I really wish Terry Melcher had given him his shot (laughs). Maybe this film would have never been made.

This last bit goes against what Jack Sargeant (who curated Van Bebber's films for the festival, and gave an intro on the night) wrote in his blurb in the MUFF programme about Van Bebber - "...films [like Van Bebber's] don’t have to make hip references to the detritus of pop culture": they don't have to, but they still do, after all, the Manson family is precisely this detritus of pop culture (falling into the shame register of celebrity, of course). For me, I think that what was so conventional about the film was the framing narrative that was used (a TV journalist putting the finishing touches on a documentary about Manson in the 90s, uh oh, violent crazy teens have arrived!...). The Manson family scenes we see in the film were supposedly taken from this documentary. I found that the frame held things together, kept history safely distanced (with fuzzy-looking film deliberately aiming for authenticity). This is a technique that has been absorbed into the cinematic mainstream for years (The Blair Witch Project, et. al). If we could define The Manson Family as an "underground" film, then it is so in the way that Dogma film is. I am not knocking the film here - as I said, I thoroughly enjoyed it - I just question the way that it was represented in the programme and I don't feel that this kind of promotion is necessary for what was a soundly-made horror film with amazing visuals, especially for the drug-fucked scenes.

I so wish that I had sat near Van Babber though - I could hear him talking for most of the film, and I'm sure that if I'd sat closer it would have made for the most entertaining live director's commentary...

Tomfoolery

In her recent book On Not Being Able To Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World, Jacqueline Rose provides a great definition for what constitutes celebrity in contemporary society (in an essay originally published after the death of Diana) that is worth sharing here: I’m using it to think about Tom Cruise’s recent media hi-jinx in the lead-up to the release of War of the Worlds. Firstly, Rose acknowledges the paradoxical, impossible relation of celebrity, providing a source of entertainment that is able to provoke mixed feelings of love and hatred that can become intertwined with the viewer's subject-self identification. More than this, she posits that one of the deeper reasons for the cult of celebrity is a somewhat perverse need for the star’s ruin:

“Celebrity is often a ritual of public humiliation. Indeed, in relation to celebrity, shaming often appears to be the point.”

So, no matter how beloved the celebrity figure may be depicted in the media, we still feel that repressed desire for scandal, decline, and the fall from paradise – indeed, how low can a star fall? Culturally, it is one of our favourite literary motifs. With Tom Cruise, we can see the curse of celebrity as ritual of humiliation by his playing the role of hyperactive performing monkey on Oprah. Because of his sheer enthusiasm to the studio audience, Cruise appeared kinda scary because he broke a number of typical conventions of the Hollywood celebrity: stars are not supposed to court or enjoy their fame, it is a burden that must be endured (Jacqueline Rose again: “a celebrity is someone all too close who also stages something in the nature of a magical disappearing act.”). High, low; there, not there; present, absent: the paradox of celebrity means that for a moment Tom had kind of sunk to the level of a reality television star. Which is fitting, considering that he was on Oprah, after all, which in its hey-day was a locus in which the “ordinary” person could become (almost) famous.

But the intensity of the subsequent reportage in the world media presages a major source of anxiety toward Cruise’s talk show performance. The general view expressed is that Tom Cruise is not acting enough like a real star (reading MX on the way home the other day, I read that one late-night comedian in the US has recently said something like “OK, Tom, we’ll go and see War Of The Worlds, just please stop all of this madness!” as if it were simply too much for Tom to be sinking to such a low level). It seems unbefitting for the sheer magnitude of his celebrity, but analysing this through Rose’s psychoanalytic reading we can see that he is absolutely fulfilling the other half of the celebrity contract by making himself the object of mild shame! Just as long as he can resurrect his position and oscillate between the two spheres of admiration/humiliation: I would argue counter to Rose that it is the movement between the two that is the point.

Rose offers a final definition for celebrity:

“Celebrities are the people required by us to embody or to carry the weight of the question: who are we meant to be performing to, or what are we doing when performing to an invisible audience? We should never assume that because an audience is present, visible, that there isn’t an invisible one, hidden but present too. Among other things, public celebrity might be an elaborate diversion from the complex, often punitive audience, inside the mind (one narcissism as a diversion from another).”

The “weight” mentioned here lies in the sense of temporality – status quo is tantamount to eternity. How does the reality television star fit into this definition of celebrity that Rose lays out? Obviously we are looking at an inferior breed of celebrity, although the reality TV celebrity is someone “all to close” to us, which is always compelling, reality television stars do not embody the classical celebrity of Rose’s definition because:

1. They unembarrassedly seek fame.

But real stars can do this too (witness Cruise) so more importantly

2. There is a recognition that their subsequent fame will be fleeting and soon lost.

Rove’s contempt for the latest Big Brother evictee that I reacted to last week was bound into this acknowledgement of the ephemeral nature of her fame. I think a sense of shame is the point here too, but add to this a sense of betrayal that Rove taps into: you do not come close to embodying any of the questions that I ask of you.

The mythological figure that best describes the true celebrity: Atlas. Like Atlas, Tom Cruise needs to bear the weight for a life-time, to do anything less would be profoundly dissatisfying.

Fevered Televisual Grumblings

So right now I have a bad case of bronchitis that appeared virtually overnight. On Saturday I felt one hundred percent healthy, then on Sunday I had a day of heavy flu symptoms: headaches, vivid dreams, exhaustion, etc. I spent the day in bed, hoping that I could kill it off by staying warm. Not quite. The next day saw the appearance of two new sorts of abject liquids: watery vomit and a treacle-ish green ooze in my lungs that murmured whenever I breathed and when I was lucky enough made itself manifest to me on tissues when I coughed. As my little sister called me once when I had a chest infection (I had asthma as a child, so it was often), I was Gem the Phlegm. Again. That was when I went to the doctor:

G: I’m fairly sure that I have a bronchial cough – it’s happened so quickly, it normally takes ages.
Doctor: Let me listen…oh yes! Oh yes! [Way too excited here] Of course you do! It must have been this cold weather, it could have brought it on more quickly. Can’t you tell you have it, don’t you have trouble breathing?
G: Yes… that’s why I came here.

What drugs did my doctor prescribe for me? Antibiotics, steroids (yes, I thought that seemed unnecessary, but apparently my bronchitis is severe and I needs me extra boost ‘o chemicals), a Ventolin puffer, plus the usual cold and flu tablets. Mornings and evenings are becoming quite ritualistic for me. The directions on some of the tablets seem more than a little bit over precise verging on sadistic: for the antibiotics, the directions are “take ONE tablet TWICE a day with the first mouthful of food until all is taken.” They’re those mother-sized tablets too, so big that I keep accidentally crunching down on them and taste how disgusting they are. Faithfully, I’ve been following this direction to the letter (like perhaps it stops nausea or stomach upsets or something), but today I made the first part of my breakfast a glass of water, and I haven’t suffered any ramifications yet…

But to continue on with my grumblings… The pure pleasure of a blog-rant sometimes makes you wonder about the form's potential hidden socio-political function - a bit like Sharon Zukin’s Adorno-esque problematic in her study of cultural capital in New York, that the fashionable Manhattan youngsters who make no money in the arts industry don’t mind so much about being exploited in their bit-jobs with shit pay because they don’t feel it is their real career and therefore is nothing worth worrying or complaining about. I don’t get heard on a public forum very much, well that’s OK, I can say all that I want to the symbolic Other on my blog… I digress (but at least it’s still all in the spirit of complaint). Last night, I turned to crap prime-time TV for some visual solace. With my headache last night, it hurt too much to read, and I looked forward to seeing what commercial television could offer to me. Nothing, it seemed. The OC was yet another episode with a recycled storyline from last season and from every other teen soap before it. Not carefully borrowed, but blatantly stolen – for example a large part of the show was set in Miami at the infamous college Spring Break. Infamous? I only know that it is infamous because I have seen it happen before on Dawson’s Creek! Remember, that time when Dawson and Pacey go there and… oh, don’t worry, it happened.

Admittedly, I didn’t really pay much attention to the intricacies of the episode as I was on the phone for most of the hour. But then I made the mistake of continuing the Channel 10 odyssey by watching some of Rove. Only when I’m sick, really! Yes, I got a little bit interested when I noticed that the street-interview segment “Roving with Rove” was filmed at the recent Superheroes conference on campus, so I was expecting a little bit of lively conversation from the participants. Nope. Rove went there with a couple of important questions like “What Superhero do you want to be?” (considering that all of the interviewees were dressed in superhero outfits, this question seemed a little superfluous, perhaps “why” would have been more appropriate); then his next question was something like “Who is a real life villain?” Ask a boring question… The conference was made to appear bland and inconsequential (the same way that higher education is normally presented in popular media, then) and I’m sure that all of the more interesting conversation that couldn’t be filtered into a single Rove-ian soundbyte sentence was swiftly edited out.

Then, I got annoyed when Rove interviewed the most recent evictee from Big Brother, Rachel. Rove did his usual fluff-interview (“what was it like to live in the house?” whatever the normal tripe he comes up with). As she was leaving, Rove said something patronising to the audience (I’m paraphrasing) like “yes, I think your fifteen minutes are well and truly up.” I hate the second-class citizenship that is meted out to reality television stars on these kinds of shows. Rove sells itself as a largely interview-based show, but if Australian Idol and Big Brother weren’t around to prop up Rove with extra cross-promotional interviews, how would the very show survive? I’m sure the show's ratings are oftentimes attributable to these kinds of short-term celebrities, so the condescension in his tone was the kind used by a master who doesn’t like the look of his servants. If you don’t like interviewing them, Rove, it’s easy, stop exploiting them on your show!

It was all the visual equivalent of phlegm anyway – soft, slimey, leaving a bad taste in my mouth. At this point I’d naturally had enough of Rove, and I decided to remedy my poor night of TV-viewing by watching a DVD of a quality drama – The Sopranos. I sat happily and watched the last two episodes of Season Two. These episodes are really so excellently written and filmed, they just inspire awe. Really, the only good news I’ve heard in the last week concerning TV is that Season Five comes out on DVD in Australia next month. But speaking of remedies, I’m going to end this rant now because I need to go and get some more pills, and take some more ventolin inhalations, and perhaps make myself a hot water bottle. Or curl up and die. One or the other.

Of all things, I am most of all very angry with my body at the moment.

Seeing (Is Not) Believing

How good was the Is Not Magazine launch party last night? Very good! I was especially delighted by the Baby Take A Bow cabaret dancers - there needs to be more burlesque action around Melbourne, I reckon.

And Issue 2 looks great (except for my piece of course!). I would have stopped to read it on Lygon Street this morning, but it was pouring with rain and I was forced to flee past it and to carefully avoid the giant lake of water in front of it. It's good to see that the poster print seems to stand the rain well, though...

Viaggio in Italia

In Promised Lands: Cinema, Geography, Modernism, Sam Rohdie writes about his own film-induced tourism adventure:

"Do you remember, one summer, in Naples, we retraced the steps of Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia? We took photographs in Il Bersagliere, posed in front of the Excelsior, walked along the embankment opposite where George Sanders had picked up a whore who he took for a melancholy ride to nowhere. His reality and its sadness were exposed without a word, like ours. Do you remember? And the time in Pompeii, when they discovered the clay mould of a couple embracing at death, and their own desperation? And the ferry ride to anguish and silences and hurt in the Bay of Naples?

I wonder what we reproduced. Why did we choose to do so? It certified something disquieting. Then, I only wanted to translate what had happened in the film, just for fun, like a game, like children. But now, I know other reasons. If you know the result beforehand, Rossellini said, there is little point in filming it. To film, like 'to write', is to reveal something, not to record what has already been revealed and that you already know. When Sanders and Bergman find each other during the hysteria of the religious festival, after having been lost to each other, it is like a miracle. I am certain Rossellini came upon the ending as they came upon each other.

The experiment has to be done with care to avoid coming to a conclusion and thereby cheapening the journey. Viaggio in Italia is never cheap. Film narratives, most of them, impose sense. Rossellini had to decompose sense, to allow sense to flourish, giving birth to significance by making it uncertain.

If I had said anything like that to you, you might have looked bored.

The game I played and the one you played were different even if it seemed that we were playing together."

To me, this resonates with what Glen has been writing about lately, that not everyone follows the same rules within the confines of a singular event (and coincidentally, both Glen and Rohdie are referring to a game that is played out between people). So, how can one define the parameters of the film-induced tourism event? I guess that it begins when the film is first watched, when the viewer is seated at home watching it on the TV or at the cinema. For Rohdie, we see his journey begin as a retroactive homage to the film-event - a "reproduction" or an attempted simulation of the symbolic conditions of possibility of the film-event. Deleuze has written that it is impossible for becoming to occur simply by imitation - what needs to happen is for the film-event to also become the film-induced tourism event. So, as Rohdie's journey continues, it begins to blend with his own experience (the sadness and the anguish are jointly shared by film-characters and Rohdie/partner). And what Rohdie is suggesting in this passage is that only some films allow such becomings - the films that can "decompose sense" are the films that can enable film-becomings.

Best Procrastination Ever

GemSimpson
Originally uploaded by gmblac.

Watching famous people become Simpsons characters always made me fantasise about having my own caricature made! So, when I saw Mel's entry today I was inspired to make my own self portrait at last.

Obviously (I'm holding a DVD and a remote), I have to have some kind of relationship with Comic Book Guy. Or with my side hair parting, I might be related to Dolph...

I'm thinking of my thesis too: there is an obvious connection to be drawn here with the potential motivations of some film-induced tourists - is drawing yourself as a Simpsons character similar to taking a photograph of yourself at a film location site? As James Preston has written about film-induced tourists:

"these tourists effectively integrate themselves into stories which already have collective capital, recognition, and understanding among their peer group and beyond. They in a way become a part of the film or television programme by visiting the locations where the film has been shot."

Both film-induced tourism and becoming a Simpsons character seem to represent ways of incorporating the spectator into the visual spectacle (and the narrative) of the moving image.

Computer Blues

Well, not computer blues, more like computer black[out]s. The video card on my laptop has died again, and only six months since the CSAA conference fiasco at Fremantle.* Back in those heady pre-back up days, it took over three weeks before I was able to get back to a current draft of my thesis (which ultimately gave me a relatively stress-free Christmas, for a change). This time I'm safe, but while I wait for it to be fixed I am basically in lock-down in the Mac lab at SGS. The Dean's office is being repainted on the floor below, so I think I might also be losing brain cells to the fumes, which might be a reason for why my writing is taking so long, and why it is so wacky. Anyway, now you know where I am if you need me...

* I discovered just after Mel's excellent paper that my own paper for that conference was irretrievable from the dead machine, and I had to give my paper the next day. The result was a long night at my hostel with a borrowed computer and an ancient draft on my pen drive. Oh, and I was also kept company by the bed flea/midge things that covered my arms and legs in bites by the end of the trip.

Deleuze and the Film Tour

In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Gilles Deleuze writes that cinema can "with impunity, bring us close to things or take us away from them and revolve around them, it suppresses both the anchoring of the subject and the horizon of the world." In this sense, he is writing about the cinema's capacity to allow the spectator to virtually travel, to sit in a movie theatre and allow the moving images before one to allow some kind of mental transportation, the so-called "magic carpet ride" of the cinematic and televisual moving image. And yet with the discursive rise of film-induced tourism at the end of the 1990s as a major new trend in global tourism, one might also argue that the virtual cinematic image can also allow the subject to actually travel, to bring him/her close to the landscapes shown in film, to have the ability to physically revolve around and tread in these spaces. In this type of actual travel, of course, the horizon of the world is brought somewhat closer than in the virtual travel that Deleuze delineates.

Thesis-erick

Sometimes, one of the worst experiences of doing a research PhD - other than the sheer torture that can sometimes come with the writing process - is being constantly asked what your project is about. Most around are quite unaware of how much internal damage that seemingly innocent question "so, what's it about?" is likely to ellicit when you feel that you don't really know what it's about either.* But, one does develop a standard response to be repeated verbatim until the topic changes again. At the moment, my stock sound byte is: "it's an analysis of virtual and actual types of cinematic touring, based around the discursive growth of film-induced tourism." This is usually enough for both non-academic and scholarly friends alike - after this, they are content to leave me to my sorry fate, I think. But for those who do enquire further, I've just developed a more interesting mode of expression, via the underused poetic form of the limerick:

We watch film with a touring gaze
It was different once from these days
Now - we want real
Then - film itself was the deal
I will show you in so many ways.

I love the crudity that comes of this ultra-condensation. I'm thinking about putting my thesis-erick onto small pieces of card and handing them out to people when they ask me in the future. Although I might have to write a second verse explicating further upon the "in so many ways" bit.

* I am speaking generally for PhD research students even though perhaps not all feel the same way that I do - it's just that when I try to say that I'm the only one who feels this way about things, I am then accused of being paranoid.

Dogville

Lars Von Trier’s avant-garde release Dogville (2003) deliberately ruptures the normal spatial conventions of contemporary feature film through its utilisation of an interior theatrical setting rather than a naturalistic, location-based one. Whilst the film is set in a small town in the United States, it was in actuality shot on a plain black soundstage in Switzerland, the actors walking around on a set that more than anything else resembles a giant version of the boardgame Cluedo. Each building of the eponymous town is represented by painted white lines on the stage, and even the resident dog is an outline set onto the ground until the final scene. Despite the theatrical set-up of the studio, the cinematography still remains resolutely cinematic, with crane shots and bird’s-eye-views of the territory mapping out the scene. While these shots normally work to create a touristic gaze, in this case they function as empty signifiers for there is no real object (i.e. no landscape) to justify the lushness of such a gaze.

Brechtian in style, Dogville was created to shock (employing spatializing language, in one interview Von Trier calls the movie a “moon landing” compared to the other more “filmic” movies released in recent years). Even more telling of the rupturing of the geographic reality effect has been the negative reception to the film from American critics on the grounds of authenticity. When it has been considered alongside Von Trier‘s previous film Dancer in the Dark (2001) – another film set in small town USA, but filmed on location in Europe – some critics have accused the director of not being able to depict thier nation accurately enough on film. In this reasoning we find the the concept that location shooting in the United States will lead Von Trier to some kind of increased authenticity in filmmaking. Responding to such criticism, Von Trier has pointed out that many films made in the United States have been set in other countries:

"I seemed to remember that they never went to Casablanca when they did Casablanca…so I thought that’s unfair, so I have to make more films taking place in America."

What Von Trier disregards by referring to the case of Casablanca (1943) is that the film-making conditions in vertically integrated Hollywood in 1943 were radically different to the conditions of horizontally integrated global Hollywood in 2003. As referred to in the narrative of Casablanca, the geographical “real” city was a strategic military position for the length of the second world war; in fact, a summit held by the allied forces ended up pushing forward the film’s release date so that it could maximise the free pre-publicity given by the real event. Whilst overseas location shooting had always remained a small part of the studio system for the occasional prestige picture, at this particular juncture in history, it was simply not financially feasibile or safe to film on location in North Africa. What is certain is that that the audience would not have expected location shooting to be a part of the film’s reality effect: this could be provided by such factors as the exterior sets, the performance of the actors, the dialogue and the world-weary narrative. In the current stage of late capitalism, where the emphasis lies firmly on consumption rather than production, international travel has become relatively affordible for many residents in developed countries: therefore for a contemporary film to achieve this reality effect, it will often need to be shot on location too, or else it must employ special effects that approximate to such a geographic reality.

Therefore, by changing the conditions of cinematic space, in Dogville Von Trier is throwing the gauntlet to a western cinema that has been organised around the cultural hegemony of global Hollywood.

A Virtual Claude Glass?

No, "Claude Glass" is not my new online pseudonym: the Claude glass was a type of viewfinder for the eighteenth-century Grand Tourist, a must-have travel accessory named after the reknowned Picturesque artist Claude Genee/Lorraine (1604-1682). Its function was to help the spectator frame the landscape so that the appropriate artistic perspective could be attained. It was like an ezy-shot camera before the ezy-shot camera existed, except the view was exclusive to the observer, only available on location and non-recordible. Often, it was tinted a brown colour so that the view would take on the burnished look of a scene from classical antiquity - the perfect accompaniment to an Arcadian-looking perspective and a way for the Grand Tourist to switch his or her view from an ordinary to an extraordinary one.

While a lot has been written about the Claude glass pre-empting photography and the tourist postcard, there is still always a danger in simply saying "and then this became this..", because there are always alternate genealogies that may be overlooked from such determinism. Perhaps a lineage can be drawn too between tinted Claude glasses and sunglasses. Both offer the spectator darkened, framed, fashionable perspectives, but of course the major difference is that the pragmatic view from a pair of sunglasses quickly lapses into the invisible technology of everyday life. During a harsh summer in Melbourne, seeing the naked midday view is a much stranger experience than seeing the shaded one. Still, the aura of my first time remains with me: I still remember my excitement at the age of four when I got my first junior red pair and repeatedly took them on and off - Light! Dark! Light! Dark! - enjoying the swinging perspectival shift to a degree that would have pleased Freud. Eventually, I think I was told off for looking at the sun. I had a tendency then for taking new concepts literally, and thought that that was what sunglasses were for.

Now, twenty years later, I'm a Cultural Studies PhD research student working at the University of Melbourne. My project is based upon finding intersections between cinema and travel, particularly in studying the recent phenomenon of location-based film tourism. You can probably work out why I've chosen the title Virtual Claude Glass for my blog's title now. It resonates well with the subject matter of my thesis (art/cinema/tourism), plus it's one of the first technologies of the touristic gaze. You could say that the virtual Claude glass is a metaphor for cinema itself. Like the glass held up to the countryside, the screen of the cinema provides a certain view that can transform the landscape into an artistic and ideal one, peopled with heroes and mythology. Then, the knowledge that I gather as a postgrad becomes my own private virtual Claude glass: it provides me a gaze, but a tinted gaze at that. The challenge remains to to keep my gaze fresh and not let it become an everyday, regular perspective that turns me blind.

On this blog page, I'll share my thoughts and notes on cinema, tourism, space, theory, etymology, urban studies, mass media, literature and whatever else is bothering, interesting or alarming me. Probably most of what I say here will be the written equivalent of ezy-shots: touristic vignettes taken from a package tour off the beaten track of my dissertation. What's a relief writing here - you can tell this already - is that I don't necessarily need to posit an argument, or I can contradict myself, or remain ambivalent about particular issues. This is a luxury that I can't have when I turn to writing my thesis.