Minio's Ramblings on Cinema

Have you seen Blood Fingers/Brutal Boxer yet? It's a 1972 HK action film that's said to be one of the bloodiest in the genre.
And yes, Jackie acts in the film, but his total screentime is about 50 seconds long, all in seperate scenes. The trailer looks pretty cool.

No. Bad quality rip & English dub only & the edges of the frame seem to have been cut / bad aspect ratio.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

well that won't stop me from watching it.
another recommendation is 'ATTACK OF THE KUNG FU GIRLS' - A movie so violent the MPAA gave it a PG rating!!!


(It's M15+ here in Aussie)

Yet another proof that all greats & legit filmmakers & cinephiles do this. And the reason why he's so good formally. Puny directors of today focus all on ideas and story and can't shoot a film for shieeeeeeeeeeeet. Don't know how to make it breathe, and so on.

The dude was mad.

TFW you have a 6-hour-long silent serial but without any soundtrack and you have to decide what to listen to while watching it but then you realize it's too late anyway and you won't fit it in today and tomorrow there's work and you won't fit it in either and you end up disappointed and sad and then rush to watch at least two other 90-minute-long films to get the best of Sunday and then realize that by posting on MoFo you're wasting precious minutes and want to say something rude and outrageous to get banned but then realize it'd be childish and decide to just stop visiting MoFo and then remember Jeff and then you no longer care and just want to watch movies till you die instead of MoFoing it.

On the contrary, I believe one has to be masochist in order to make films for oneself and not for others. To know one's lineage, one's (national) cinema, one's socio-political environment - aren't those the necessary conditions that forces one into the act of artistic creation? To not blindly accept the universal language of cinema, but to particularize/contextualize it - to internalize and make it "mine". That requires a certain level of self-awareness to be receptive to intense sensation passing through one's body (and mind).

Pedro Costa on Ridley Scott:

Whatever, I'll take Alien over every Pedro Costa movie.


And I like Pedro Costa. Just not as much as Alien.

I added the quote just due to the duty of a chronicler.

LOL, I read it as "Allen" instead of "Alien" at first.

Pasolini was right. Conventional art always corrupts one's soul.

I'm trying to purify mine.

Conventional art is un-problematic. I understand the critique that Ridley Scott's brand of cinema is fascism, when I look at films whose core revolves around the good and the bad - as in Alien or Gladiator, rather than contextualizing it proclaims to be timeless, universal and hence free from ideology. And as Zizek would always remind us - the claim that one can step outside of ideology and go beyond (or rather under) is itself the far more prevalent and pernicious ideology that plagues our neoliberal era today. Fascism doesn't problematize but wraps up all the solutions/answers into a neat package and sell it to the mass consumer. That's what cliche means. It shuts down and forecloses Thought; everything is banal. The contrary is what Walter Benjamin calls "communist" art, which problematizes EVERYTHING. It keeps as much outside the frame as what is directly/explicit about what is said, leaving the implicit unsaid but letting it seep into the frame. I believe the main dialectic between conventional vs unconventional cinema lies in the art of EXPRESSION. The finest unconventional cinema that pushes art to its limits are those that play around precisely around the thresholds/limits of perception and expression - ie. every simultaneous act of clarification/outcome (as in Heideggerian "unconcealing") is also an obfuscation ("concealing") of its grounds/processes. It gives as much potency to the silent invisibles (in a Derridean sense) than the directly expressed, haunting the present with the gravity of the past and to-come.

poser

Quite the contrary. I think that it's the opposite of being a poser. After all, doesn't striving to like conventional art and (over)rating it reek of ostentatiously trying too hard and dropping one's standards in an attempt to promote art that pleases contrary to the art that amazes and elevates the soul?

What's missing in almost all conventional art is that element of deep and unadulterated awe, a sort of spiritual elevation. This can be found in very low art, the art for the most common folk, the lowest of the low (including commercial art for the common folk). And then it's missing all the way up to very high art where it's there again, in an appropriately heightened and cultured version, of course.

This is a huge oversimplification, as it has a very, very specific kind of conventional art in mind. There are attempts at (mainly tokenist) problem-presenting in a lot of conventional art. But it still isn't sincere or good or powerful. And it sure as hell doesn't elevate the spirit.

I don't know man. I've seen so many leftist-leaning or even downright leftist/Marxist/communist propaganda films (same goes for the right, but it's usually the leftist cinema that is appreciated more) that I just cannot wholeheartedly agree that it's only that Hollywood conventional art that claims it knows the clear definition of what is good and what is bad. I think somebody's problem might be that conventional art doesn't engage enough (in a political sense) with what is good and what is bad, but the obvious reply is why does it have to? Claiming that not espousing any ideology is an ideology itself is an old one. I just don't think every film has to be a revolutionary statement or an indictment of something.

I think the main point of contention is the use of the word fascism. Maybe if Costa used a different word to describe what he has in mind, his original quote wouldn't sound so weird. I mean, the way he says it can make somebody think that it can be exchanged for "communist" and still work. Any time somebody uses 'fascism' in a context different than Mussolini's ideology and the consecutive ideology of Italy during that time, one has to keep asking questions to understand WHAT they mean by 'fascism' and it usually is something that isn't fascism in any way, though it's also often something that is hard to name with just one word otherwise.

Artistic expression is not a zero-sum game where clarity comes at the cost of mystery.

I think the issue is that some people use words within a very specific context without saying they do. What follows is people not aware of that framework, or even people who are aware of that framework but who don't know if that framework was used. This ends up in more misunderstandings.

I know that I will get beat up again for saying this, but all of these arguments about movie fascism strike me as exercises in an almost humorous, academic over-thinking. Having grown up around old folks that saw the actual real thing and barely got out alive (they were among the lucky that just hadn't been killed yet), any equivalence between popular, butts in the seat movies, is beyond absurd. Nobody is dragging movie fans off to their death and Ridley Scott isn't suggesting that they should be and nobody in any recent version of "Hollywood" is making The Triumph of Will. The gestapo doesn't patrol studios and theaters nor does a bolshevik commissar.

"Communist" movies are just as ridiculous. Again, nobody's being dragged off to Siberia over movies. In spite of occasional loan-availability purges in the movie world over politics as well as the desire of the financial backers of movies to widen their commercial appeal, movies are delightfully lacking in real world political influence.....no commissars there either. None of us actually have to see a movie.

This is the kind of stuff that is kicked around in university seminars, some of which I have sat through, but not seeing that movies are meant as a profit-making, populist exercise ignores reality. Like it or not, when you go to the bank and ask for a loan to make a movie, the guy in the pin-striped suit will ask you how much you think the movie will make and whose numbers you use for that calculation. Aesthetics and politics are secondary factors.

Costa is from the school of Straub. It should come as no surprise he'd misuse the word fascism just like any Communist/leftie would.

I think many leftists see what's happening in Gaza, what's happening in the film world, and how money and popular poor taste dictate so much in the latter's framework, and they're pissed and depressed and very frustrated, and then the word fascism comes as a nice catch-all phrase to describe everything they don't like.

Fascism doesn't exclusively mean being carted off to concentration camps. That can be the extreme end result of it, but it doesn't begin there.


So talking about fascism in art is not about people being penalized physically or detained by a film. Of course it isn't, because that would be beyond moronic to think or even suggest.


Fascism in art is about allowing films to do your thinking for you, to dictate what they should say and how they should say it. Essentially, turning the audience into passive consumers of whatever (in this case, the studio's) want you to think. It's also about fostering apathy towards these conditions (you know, like the kind of people who say you need a billion dollars to change the state of film and it's messaging, otherwise suck it up, you don't have the power to change anything).


It's basically a precursor to actual fascism implemented by political movements. They don't need to be working in tandem, but this kind of filmmaking and blob audience mentality is the kind of thing you will find in societies at risk for being taken over by authoritarianism.


But, sure, let's reduce this argument to its most basic absurdity in order to dismiss it with the least amount of effort possible.

I'd say it doesn't mean that at all. Concentration camps are not implicit to fascism.

I don't think he was suggesting that. I believe he was pointing out that those films cannot be fascist/communist because they weren't made in fascist/communist countries or by filmmakers who support those ideologies.

Going by this definition, any communist propaganda movie is fascist, but this sounds ludicrous. We need a new/different word for this.

This presupposes that the audience members cannot think on their own. I think this kind of commercial cinema simply doesn't ask hard political/social questions (or skims over them or simplifies them - look, exactly like communist/leftist movies) and instead unashamedly delves into the unadulterated entertainment of the masses. Its idea is to entertain, not to evangelize. That art must be inherently political and forever revolutionary is a Marxist idea, and frankly, it's really tiring.

Not all authoritarianism is fascism. Modern-day Vietnam is authoritarian & Marxist-Leninist! There are modern-day totalitarian states, like China, that are communist, not fascist. Modern-day Russia is authoritarian and it's neither fascist nor communist. I blame the left that mistakenly associates any form of authoritarian/totalitarian ideology with fascism. Of course, it would make just as little sense to call such films authoritarian. We need a different word.

It's just weird to use words in ways that differ from their original meaning. Fascism has a very, very specific meaning. Nazi Germany wasn't fascist. It was National Socialist. Word War II era Japan wasn't fascist. It was a totalitarian military dictatorship. Franco wasn't a fascist. He was a Francoist. If even Hitler and Franco weren't fascists if you're faithful to definitions and well-regarded historians, how come Ridley Scott, of all people, can be a fascist?! Does he sing praises of Mussolini or the Ustase? Once again, I have no problem with the premise that commercial art tells us what to think and we can debate this. I just think using the word fascism as leisurely as that is odd.

Quick! Somebody change the thread title to "Minio's Ramblings on Cinema and World Politics"!