From: Flick Harrison (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Oct 23 2009 - 10:18:09 PDT
There's a fabulous moment in the International (Tom Tykwer dir.,
starring Clive Owen and Naomi Watts) where the bad guys and good guys
have a giant destructive shootout in the Guggenheim museum, amidst a
multi-level, multi-screen projection of a video installation.
I still can't quite wrap my head around it, since it seems too obvious
and trite if it's really trying to say that international finance
rampages through social relations, i.e. bad guys blow up art. Then
again maybe it's just obvious and trite.
Much of it can be seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UdvVY8WuT8
Maybe the International is too problematic for your purposes, because
it's dominant cinema that takes aim at capitalist dominance, at least
internally. I suppose the whole thing is slightly infiltrative and
viral, since it's basically telling the audience the themes of Empire,
but the cloak-and-dagger stuff actually undermines the structural
critique. It fails for the same reason Soderburgh's Kafka fails: it
goes for the car chase / zombie explanation rather than the grim,
mundane reality.
A review from http://academichack.net/reviewsMay2009.htm
"Meanwhile, the singularly crappy but handsomely appointed (and
Saatchi-approved!) video installation art stopping bullets in the
Guggenheim rotunda is the work of one Julian Rosefeldt, a "socially
conscious" Berlin-based artist whose work is grandly theatrical and
patently obvious in its intent. And yet by existing as scenes "out of
time" rather than as fully coherent narratives, Rosefeldt's work
arrogates to itself the "ambiguity" that marks it as serious art.
(Read Roberta Smith's fine evisceration here ( http://tinyurl.com/yzzvj5s
.) And so, even creative resistance (like, um, The International
itself) is caught in the web of late capitalist social relations.
There is no way out, and Tykwer knows this. He may well be a poseur,
but at least he's honest."
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