Anarchist Kissing Booth: A Sǝven Point Plan

Éloge de l'amour (Jean-Luc Godard, 2001)

Blackboards (Samira Makhmalbaf, 2000)

1. Anarchism like all great things is an Announcement! The most vital right is the right to love and be loved and to obey no fixed definition of love, certainly nobody else’s, its also being critical that we curb/chasten those whose current settings find them exploiting and managing loving and being loved like they were the general manager of a sports franchise. 

2. In a letter to the anarchist Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, Eugene O’Neill, the great dipsomaniac American playwright of Irish descent, writes the following: "As for my fame and your infame, I would be willing to exchange a good deal of mine for a bit of yours. It is not hard to write what one feels as truth. It is damned hard to live it.” The Universal Anarchist returns like Nietzsche to Heraclitus, the greatest of the Pre-Socratic literalists, and to his two preeminent images of what the universe is like: the river you cannot step into twice because of its constant busy motion and the outdoor fire that embodies the elemental flux of all that which is. That’s practically already a post-industrial quantum model and we sure don’t find anything like that in either Plato or Aristotle, though just over three hundred years before Christ, the Greek philosopher Democritus came up with the concept of atoms, an accomplishment I believe deserves a good deal more open discussion and public celebration that us moderns are inclined to extend it. We’re busy. With what? We’re watching Desperate Housewives. We’ve got our feet up...we're watching other people worn down and humiliated for a change...

3. Antonin Artaud, “Cinema and Reality” [1927]: “A cinema which is studded with dreams, and which gives you the physical sensation of pure life, finds its triumph in the most excessive sort of humour. A certain excitement of objects, forms, and expressions can only be translated into the convulsions and the surprises of a reality that seems to destroy itself with an irony in which you can hear a scream from the extremities of the mind.”

4. Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord [1993]: “Rather than create entirely new forms, the Letterists wanted to take already existing elements and rearrange them. To this appropriative technique, derived in part from Dadaist collage, in part from a kind of distorted quotation favoured by both Marx and Lautréamont, they gave the name of ‘détournement.’ Détournement involves a quotation, or more generally a re-use, that ‘adapts’ the original element to a new context. It is also a way of transcending the bourgeois cult of originality and the private ownership of thought. In some cases the products of bourgeois civilization, even the most insignificant ones, such as advertisements, may be reemployed in such a way as to modify their meaning; in other cases, the effect may be to reinforce the real meaning of an original element—a sentence of Marx’s, say—by changing its form.”

    

5. There is a truly delightful near-throwaway moment in Chris Marker’s sublime The Owl’s Legacy, a 1989 documentary series about the legacy of Greek philosophy and culture. Marker has his camera trained discreetly for a moment on five or six men in animated discussion on an Athens street corner and the voice over observes dryly that the men on the streets of Athens are still acting the same way they did in Plato’s dialogues. 

6. In a conventional and tired scenario the anarchist will find themselves interrogated by newbies and simpletons. Voices shrill and blood vessels bursting, your hopeless and adrift peers will get angry at you because they assume you must believe there should not be any laws to govern the citizens of national states. “Far from it,” you are encouraged to rapidly counter, “law and the criminal justice system are the best proof we have of actively existing anarchy on a daily basis. Law exists in the first place to do its best to mitigate against all the ambient anarchy kicking up dust devils down the corridors of power and doing it all remote while enjoying a whisky sour in a bar by the Eiffel Tower. I’m quite fond of James Gray’s imperfect 2008 family crime opera We Own the Night which tells the story of two brothers in New York, sons of Robert Duvall’s stentorian and distant cop father, who split down opposing lines in early adulthood, one pursing the police work like pa and the other angling in the direction of the underworld, increasingly diabolic in his descent. The basic social set-up is one I like to imagine we all instinctively know—and it’s definitely operative in a number of Michael Mann films—cops and robbers have spent so long looking into one another’s business, their social circles increasingly circulating together, that it is now time to state outright that cops and robbers are married and somebody needs to intervene. 

7. Our three main obstacles to growth, cooperation, care, and sustainability have been our main problems since at least the French Revolution. The problems, intractable-seeming because they probably are: Education, Political Economy, and Law. I don’t have even the slightest idea how we as a species are going to find ourselves negotiating all the trouble extensive of there being so many people and a great many of them squashed together in alienating urban conditions. If you want to try to start having hope again somehow, from here on the ground in Western Canada in early March of 2026, I'm telling you straight-up that intelligent machines are the only sensible game in town. 

Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)

Otomo Yoshihide's New Jazz Quintet, "Eureka"

Did You See the Latest Bresson Meme?

I was introducing the films of Robert Bresson, the greatest master of form and rhythm the cinema has ever known, to Wendall who mostly paints houses and sells used records, for which he has a genuine knack. He got me my copy of Ornette Coleman'a Science Fiction. I made a very funny joke, I thought: I told him that because Bresson's art is both austere and clinically severe it is expected of all true adherents and acolytes alike that when pausing the movie to get snacks or go to the toilet we only do so when one or another of the characters in whichever film we're watching is in the process of passing through a doorway. After we finished watching Procès de Jeanne d'Arc from '62, Wendall immediately commented with big, wide eyes that there sure were a lot of doors and boy did they clank and such. Wendell added that the film was a "stone-cold death trip" and wondered what caused me to pick that one in particular in order to introduce him to Monsieur Bresson. I told him I just got the BFI Blu-ray and hadn't watched it yet but also it's the optimal place to begin because it is the most spare, rigorous, and precise of the director's early black and white films. You have established camp in the higher altitudes; tomorrow we reach for the summit, L'argent, Bresson's final film once and for all but also the last of those sublime colour ventures, often Dostoevsky-minded, though L'argent adapts a Tolstoy story. The rhythm and tone have been finessed to a point of peerless vision and control and in L'argent there are no longer relics or revenants of European cinema or commercial cinema, there is only the handsome ace formalist Bobby Bresson, down for whatever as long as it's classy, and when his art is in his own hands rather than those of some chump front office clerk, he uses it to say that it's a hell of a lot worse out there than anybody's telling you now but it's buttered fucking scones compared to what's incoming. Anyway, if we wanted to be really severe we could easily argue that L'argent is the only true Bresson film. 

Procès de Jeanne d'Arc (Robert Bresson, 1962)

       

L'argent (Robert Bresson, 1983)

The Jacques Rivette Sǝven Point Plan

Or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts.

- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets 

You are the music

Don't let no one tell you

That you got a job to do

Can't you hear it?

- Royal Trux, "Call Out the Lions"

Secret défense (Jacques Rivette, 1998)

1. When I defended my master’s thesis way back in 2004, I recall that the professor Mark Langer, who was not my advisor but was on my defence committee—and who I knew well and had studied with—asked, before the interrogation proper could commence, in affable M. Langer fashion, if I had seen anything good recently, so I raved enthusiastically and at length about Jacques Rivette’s 1998 slow-burn/unheimlich crime & conspiracy caper Secret défense, which I had just watched with my girlfriend on DVD, our having rented it from Canadian Netflix- equivalent mail rental service Zip.ca. My verdict that day, overheard by my entire defence committee, was that Secret défense had one of the most mind-blowing sequences I had ever seen, involving travel between multiple train stations in a semi-randomized fashion, and that Rivette has gone some length to make the viewer recollect and meditate upon both Hitchcock's Vertigo and Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity. I for one accept the challenge in the best of humours. You can't really be a film scholar I don't think if you gush so unabashedly over all the movies.

L'amour fou (Jacques Rivette, 1969)

2. In her book on Rivette for University of Illinois Press, Mary M. Wiles assesses the two main things that are bound to characterize most any Rivette film one might encounter in its natural habitat: “it becomes evident that Rivette’s authorial signature is not merely discernible in the way in which theatricality inflects his films, but also in the manner in which women’s lives are portrayed.” Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974), the director's most widely beloved film, couldn't exist in anything like the form it takes if Rivette had neglected to get his actresses to help him write it. Wiles avers that the fact Rivette preferred the credit “mise-en-scène” instead of “director” to designate his role in the lived execution of his cinema reflects “his deeply held conviction that film is a collective, rather than a solitary, endeavour.” The aesthetic of early films like Paris nous appartient (1961) and L'amour fou (1969) has things positioned just so such that we can see how Rivette and his collaborators have in uncomplicated and endlessly exciting ways turned documentary cinema methodology on their own acts of experimental theatre.  More than any other directors who we'd consider his contemporaries, with the possible exception of Polish pop-saturated theatre of cruelty monger Andrzej Żuławski, Rivette believed with the blazing intensity of the devout in performance as a polyvalent subject in and of itself.

Out 1 (Jacques Rivette, 1971)

3. Things Rivette said terrified him: “the State, Money, the Police, the Party…” The emancipatory [praxis] is collaborative and expressive, it disrupts productively and is characterized by rituals in which women attain self-possession through the ongoing pursuit of destabilizing performative rapture and of the ecstatic loss at the heart of creation. Female agency and female solidarity are celebrated precisely for their power to subvert presiding heteronormative/patriarchal constraints. Literature, theatre, music, painting, and sculpture are the stuff of which sharing and caring are made.

La belle noiseuse (Jacques Rivette, 1991)

4. Rivette: “The work is always much more interesting to show than the result. I can watch a coppersmith in a Roquier film for three hours. A caldron, even if it is the most beautiful in the world, I will have viewed from all angles in three minutes.”

La bête humaine (Jean Renoir, 1938)

Jaguar (Jean Rouch, 1967)

5. Rivette first became passionate about the idea of making films because of the influence of Jean Cocteau and especially after having read the diaries Cocteau kept detailing the making of 1946’s La Belle et la Bête. Rivette came in short order to be inspired by Jean Renoir and Jean Rouch in both of whom he saw profound evidence that “realism” springs from “chance” and excels when it can make use of it.  Rivette changed course after interviewing Renoir for Jean Renoir la patron in 1966. Through Renoir and his work, Rivette saw unveiled, feat of majestic prestidigitation,  “a cinema which does not impose anything, where one tries to suggest things, to let them happen, where it is mainly a dialogue at every level, with the actors, with the situation, with the people you meet, where the act of filming is part of the film itself.” 

Histoire de Marie et Julien (Jacques Rivette, 2003)

6. In Duelle (1976) and Noroît (1976), the first two parts of an aborted trilogy on Celtic myth and ritual transplanted to Paris and Brittany respectively, Jacques Rivette wades way perilously out into the dodgy depths of magical rites, duels, “phantom goddesses” (of Sun and Moon), and the festival inter-realm interval of the quarantaine [annual period where phantom goddesses freely walk the earth and interact with mortals]. The 2003 masterpiece Histoire de Marie et Julien actually had its original genesis as a component of the mid-seventies quarantaine cycle, but Rivette, hospitalized for nervous exhaustion, had to abort pre-production for the third one and rest up per doctor's orders. That the film that finally emerged in 2003 deals with a revenante [spirit doomed to return] played by Emmanuelle Béart, who recites the geis, a magical incantation derived from druidism, and performs the geste interdit [gesture of prohibition], may cause one to muse that sinister occult forces may have interceded somewhere along the line and that this wily Jacques Rivette gentleman may well be truly malign. A truly Rivettian supposition, at any rate!

7. Paris is the eternal face of the supine Sphinx. I think she needs a lice treatment. Sadness is appeased and serenity restored.

 

Royal Trux, "Call Out the Lions"

Little Blue House on the Prairie

 

I had yielded to the dramatizing suggestion of the park. It was sensation in its pure state. No, it was sensation apprehended as abyss. I was plunging into it. Once more I was lost, for I could see no way of getting out. I was hypnotized by persecution, but without ever bothering to find out by whom. I am rather lazy.

- Henri Micheaux, Miserable Miracle

He lived on a barge moored near a big town and his name was Cidrolin. He was served a not very fresh crayfish with glaucous mayonnaise. 

- Raymond Queneau, The Blue Flowers 

The House by the Cemetery (Lucio Fulci, 1981)

Blue Rita (Jess Franco, 1977)

Nearly a year ago now I moved from an increasingly claustrophobic, uninhabitable, and terminally gentrified condominium complex in Calgary's central Mission neighbourhood into a little, blue, and very wonderful house one neighbourhood to the east in Erlton, right at the other end of Lindsay Park, which is just about as accessible on foot from here as it was from the old haunt, though my feet now are much worse feet than they once were on account of necrotic tissue pain. It was my mother and my mother alone who made the move happen and I am at my best no more than an adequately humble beneficiary. The principal point of distinction of my little blue house on the prairie in Erlton—especially if you were pitching it to some fetching kawaii goth lady with a Hello Kitty on her Italian leather jacket—is that it is absolutely surrounded by cemeteries. Truly. You've probably never seen anything quite like it 'cause I know I sure hadn't. There are five substantial, noteworthy cemeteries in Erlton and all of them, the Chinese and Jewish cemeteries included, were established in the late 19th / early 20th centuries...though I guess you can't really call it living history...    

Aselefech Ashine and Getenesh Kebret with Army Band

Wenders, Ozu...

Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939)

Alice in the Cities (Wim Wenders, 1974)

In the both widely and deeply loved 1974 film Alice in the Cities, a modestly-scaled black and white transnational classic with big heart, star Rüdiger Vogler plays author, journalist, and grifter-sleuth Philip Winter for the first but not the last time in a film by Wim Wenders, Vogler’s collaborator and buddy. The film commences with the stumblebum German factotum lost on some vague and probably vaporized assignment in the United States, playing around with his then-brand-new, highly-novel—and most of all affordable—commercial grade Polaroid camera, but mostly really just slouching and registering checked-out, nary a sense of the direction in which to point his toes. About ten minutes into Alice in the Cities, Philip Winter falls asleep in an anonymous hotel bed, appearing almost as though to drift peacefully and passively in and out of consciousness as the sounds of the hotel cathode-ray television tube transmit scenes from John Ford’s 1939 film Young Mr. Lincoln, including one in which Henry Fonda, starring as young Illinois lawyer Abe Lincoln, plays a more than serviceable mouth harp. The scene does a sublime job of capturing the nebulous zone you enter when you fall asleep while watching a movie or playing a record. We might also pause to consider this nocturnal television event later, two years later, when Vogler, playing Bruno Winter in Kings of the Road, declares: “The Yanks have colonized our Unconscious.” Insofar as concerns the scene in the hotel room and the benevolent appropriation of the John Ford material, one might assume that material was selected in advance so as to be a basic precondition of the scene and its requirements. Wenders is a big outspoken fan of Ford and of Young Mr. Lincoln in particular. Writer Peter Handke, another regular Wenders collaborator and brother in jukeboxes / movie houses, wrote a novel called Short Letter, Long Farewell, published two years before Alice in the Cities came out, in which John Ford and Young Mr. Lincoln both figure prominently. Well, not so fast, hold your horses. On the commentary track for Alice in Cities contained on the Criterion Blu-ray, Wenders says the scene was shot in New Jersey and that he looked in the TV Guide earlier that day to see what was playing later, because there were always lots of movies running on American TV, and Young Mr. Lincoln merely presented itself as the most appropriate of the available options.    

To underscore what a major film Young Mr. Lincoln was for that firebrand generation of militant cinephiles who formed the French Nouvelle Vague and its bustling rats-with-plastic-forks Arrière-garde, allow me to treat you to a scrumptious historical footnote, remembered at this point no doubt by none save perhaps academics with a specialization in the vicinity and yours truly, in ill health and in worse: 1972, two years before Alice in the Cities and the same year as Handke’s Short Letter, Long Farewell, the illustrious Cahiers du Cinéma, shortly to turn over to Serge Deny and actively swinging Maoist and Lacanian simultaneous-like, did an entire issue of the magazine on Ford’s 1939 legal beagle oater and its lanky lead, with every last faintly glimmering semiotic detail covered by at least three autonomous voices. 

Until the End of the World (Wim Wenders, 1991)

Ohayô (Yasujirō Ozu, 1959)

I loved going to film history lectures in university because my mind would be blown thirty times before I was so much as properly seated and de-scarved. I mean it with total earnestness and extremely good recollection when I assert that one of the film history stories I first heard as an undergraduate that completely blew my mind is that of the great Japanese master Yasujirō Ozu who started making silent movies and worked constantly into the early 1960s and who additionally claimed that after he saw Victor Fleming’s 1939 Hollywood übersmash Gone with the Wind while stationed with the military in Singapore it became clear to him that the Americans were going to defeat the Japanese in the war due to the sheer superiority of their production capabilities. What a thing to sit with! The impact of Ozu’s work on the sensibility and taste of Wim Wenders is no mystery, and of course Wenders' intimate 1985 archive-artifact Tokyo-ga is explicitly about how the departed giant Ozu becomes threaded through Classical Japan and Speculative-Futurist Japan too. Had it not been for the fact that Ozu was championed by Wenders, I would not have bought a copy of the VHS tape of 1959’s Ohayô at the A&B Sound downtown when I was in high school. It’s a famously adorable comedy, on the light end of things for the director who conceals no part of life's variegated seasons, containing an awful lot of flatulence and essentially telling the story of two boys who attempt to pressure and cajole their father into providing them with a television set. If Michelangelo Antonioni pushed to the limits what he was capable of doing and capable of withstanding in forcing the colour systems of complete landscapes to bow to his regime in just one film, 1964’s Red Desert, judicious elder Yasujirō Ozu produces a sleeve-full of superior colour conjurings in each one of his final colour pictures (with special distinction due Ohayô and ’62’s An Autumn Afternoon), the whole while taking an occasional break here and there to dash off and star in a whisky advertisement on a yacht. Clearly the most fun part of building half a city block on a big empty lot is painting it all up. When people tell me that their favourite Ozu is one of the earlier black and white movies I’m almost a little confounded somehow, as though my personal value were in dispute, even should their choice happen to be ’49’s mercurial Late Spring, which is a note-perfect motion picture on every single level. 

Out for a Slice of Beef & Mushroom

Dizzee Rascal, "Fix Up, Look Sharp"

Hecate: Photoportrait

Little Blue House on the Prairie 

 

Tyvek, "Origin of What"

Catfish Dudes and Doggone Bros: An Appreciation

It’s impossible to predict the fate of my film; people go to the movies to forget about themselves, and a sunset leans exactly in the opposite direction, it’s the moment when, perhaps, we see ourselves a little more naked, that happens to me in any case, and it’s painful and useful; maybe others can make use of it too, you never know.

- Julio Cortázar, A Certain Lucas

Five Star Final (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931)

The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)

Crime Wave (André De Toth, 1953)

Private Property (Leslie Stevens, 1960)

Fail Safe (Sidney Lumet, 1964)

In Cold Blood (Richard Brooks, 1967)

The Pick-Up (Lee Frost, 1968)

Shadows and Fog (Woody Allen, 1991)

Discount Family Bundle Pack

Tortoise, "Djed"

Baby Beluga 

Dawn freshens. Her climb is done.

Down towards Glasgow she descends,

Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes,

Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces

Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.

All Scotland waits for her:

In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs,

Men long for news. 

- W. H. Auden, "Night Mail"