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Fascism as performance art
The following are the notes I’ve prepared for SIKAD’s activity, Usapang Komyu, which focused on Art and Fascism. All of the citations came from Hito Steyerl’s “Let’s Talk About Fascism,” which is to say, none of these are “original,” so to say, but a processing of local experiences of Fascist tendencies with Steyerl’s observation with…
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Killing (Japan, 2018) [SDAFF 2018]
If one is to assess Killing as the work of Shinya Tsukamoto, you may find it kind of lacking as it is less spectacular than the director’s 1980s and 90s works. But that does not take away the complexity of the themes that he is dealing with. Structurally, the film is closer to Gemini (1999), which tried to expand…
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Mirai (Japan, 2018) [Reel Asian 2018]
Mirai finds Mamoru Hosoda recreating the dimensional experiments in content, as seen in his The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006), and in form, like in Wolf Children (2012), but intimately takes place in a single setting. But this film is no downgrade. Rather, the choice of form and content pushes the technique both to its conceptual and theoretical limits.…
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DMRLW (No. 2): “The Personal is Political”
Dialectical Materialist Responses to Liberal Wokeness (No. 2): “The Personal is Political” It is often that I encounter this mis-use of the concept “the personal is political” when liberals and new age maoists online defend their personal opinions or takes or lifestyle choices as a certain validation of its importance elevated to the level…
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Dialectical Materialist Responses to Liberal Wokeness (No. 1)
Today, I’m trying to start a serial again, hopefully something which I can sustain. Still, something non-cinematic in focus. I’m trying to address in this series what the title says: responding to liberal “hot takes” through abstracting them with dialectical materialism. The method takes from the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist line which abstracts phenomena in social practice. Mao…
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New Age Maoist Aesthetics
A trend seems to be happening among young, urban activists and allies: they get easily fascinated and responsive of positive representation of politics, rebels and activists on any platform, especially on popular capitalist art. Cultural representation seems to be the name of the game. What is formerly subversive has now become a default setting. Cultural…
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Fragmented notes on Materialism, Ethics and Anti-Capitalist Praxis as a result of a Friday-night conversation over beer which I never really drank
For Mike Esteves, Vic Teaño and Adrian Mendizabal In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx differentiated what he sees as the “old” Materialism and his then “new” Materialism. The old Materialism, Marx defined as inattentive of “human sensual activities.” Terry Eagleton would later thread into Marx’ categorizations as materialisms which coexists with different projects. A…
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28 Years Into the End of History
28 years into the end of history, we are experiencing eternal contemporaneity. What the recent times have assured with Mark Fisher’s declaration of the ‘slow cancellation of the future’ is the making-contemporary of what was 5 years ago can be considered as nostalgia. Nostalgia does not exist anymore, 28 years into the end of history.…
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NIGHTSCAPE (South Korea, 2017)
Inchun Oh’s NIGHTSCAPE presents a simple but admittedly scary situation via an ingenious application of first-person POV style. Found footage has been the weapon of choice of low budget filmmakers for some time now. Right away, found footage necessarily implements the film frame as the characters’ subjectivity and bypasses conventional narrative’s need for establishing sequences. Due to…
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Violence Voyager (Japan, 2018) [JAPAN CUTS 2018]
There is no escaping the visual charm of Ujicha’s conceptually playful science fiction film Violence Voyager. While being a follow up to a film with similar style, the elusiveness of availability of the director’s first feature, The Burning Buddha Man (2013), makes Violence Voyager still quite a novel treat. While the style isn’t anything new, Ujicha’s “gekimation” being a variety…