THE GREAT CINEMA PARTY (2012, Raya Martin, A+30)

After seeing WHEN NIGHT FALLS (2012, Ying Liang, A+30) and THE GREAT CINEMA PARTY (2012, Raya Martin, A+30), we had a dinner and talked about Jacques Rancière, Serge Daney, and SATURDAY NIGHT TO MONDAY MORNING (2012, Worrawech Danuwong).

Personally, the power of WHEN NIGHT FALLS unintentionally reminds me of the power of such works as Victor Hugo's LES MISÉRABLES, CLAUDE GUEUX (2009, Olivier Schatzky, A+30), and CRAINQUEBILLE (2010, Philippe Monnier, A+30). THE GREAT CINEMA PARTY shockingly overwhelms me as much as the films of Jean-Marie Straub + Danièle Huillet, James Benning, Wachara Kanha, and Teeranit Siangsanoh. THE GREAT CINEMA PARTY makes me realize how blissful and limitless cinema can be.

Some interesting quotes:

Jacques Rancière: "This reorganization takes place between two poles. On one side, the ancient differentiation of the noble and the vile is displaced within the represented people, so that the people at the same time furnishes the central dramatic figures, battling against destiny, injustice, etc., and the picturesque or villainous background. This is the Hugo schema*. On the other side, the equality of the noble and the vile is translated in the equality of narration and style, embroiling the moral and social distinctions in their indifference. This is the Flaubert schema*. The attempt of a “critical” representation of the people has always been a negotiation between these two schema’s of redistribution of equality: heroic differentiation on one hand, subtractive indifference on the other."

"What makes the difference are thus not the “images” in the conventional sense, not the states of present bodies, but the composition of the pathways they cross. That’s where the effects of aesthetic mobilization play out. Take for example a film “about” the people, most certainly not very popular in the ordinary sense of the word, Béla Tarr’s Satantango: what is prodigious here is the mobilization and the cast in the unknown of bodies which seem to be plunged for ever in the torpor of an immobile rural world. There’s a bit of the same thing in the first two parts of Bill Douglas’ trilogy, in which a miserable childhood is like described twice: statically and dynamically. We can also think of the reversals of the figures of the “dominated” put in place by the Straubs: for example the crescendo of the sequence in which the mother in Sicilia ! visually and vocally overturns the character of woman-victim."

http://www.diagonalthoughts.com/?p=1644

Serge Daney: "To Nietzsche’s claim that “the only being known to us is being that represents itself”, the straubs would respond: only those who resist exist for sure. Resist nature, language, time, texts, gods, God, chiefs, Nazis. Mother and father. This is how the shot, basic atom of the straubian cinema, is the product, the “reste” (remainder), or rather the “restance” (remaining)* of a triple resistance: texts resisting bodies, places resisting texts, bodies resisting places. One has to add a fourth: the public resisting shots “designed” like that, stubborn resistance of cinema’s public to something intractable, something which renounces it as a public."

http://www.diagonalthoughts.com/?p=1529