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...