casual violence of history

John, thanks for the link to the essay on objects in Days of Heaven. I read it last night and found it to be very interesting. I also came across some other good essays on Offscreen. Of particular interest given my recent posts is the essay titled Lars Von Trier's Antichrist: Executioner at the Alter of the Other - The Confessor and the Executioner. It is, by far, the best 10,000 words I've read on Antichrist.

Contrary to mainstream reviewers who may cater to an audience trained by fetishistic and consumerist viewing practices that tend to drag sex and violence out of context, I would like to argue that Antichrist is unsettling because it depicts a kind of material history of gender violence played out through the demise of an intimate love tale. The story involves a husband going into isolation with his wife so that he can act as therapist to her after their infant son falls to his death neglected during a lovemaking scene between the couple –a tragedy so intense that the world disappears into their ecstasy. As they retreat into the woods to ‘heal’ her via a series of psychic exercises he has created in his adopted role, the landscape and animals that inhabit the woods, the ‘background,’ tells a parallel story. The couple that attempts to flee the distractions of the world dramatizes the world in the person, and the myth of solitude, or the idea that people can ever be independent of the world. The story debunks the myth of a history-less individual or a context-less love, reconstructing romanticism and intimacy as something that looks more like what The Invisible Committee have dubbed “the autism of two.” In this sense the film is about the violence that takes place when context is disregarded, and inevitable psychological and historical backgrounds creep in to show that the settings of society and the world cannot be removed; or that when the removal of the world is attempted, it returns in another form, as a past of human power relations that radiate into the present. Part of the film’s myriad of explicit and implicit messages is that there is no place or being in a vacuum, no individualism.

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I'm also looking forward to reading the essay on Cinephilosophy at Offscreen.

The only movies that I have watched this week are The American Philosopher and Status Anxiety.


American Philosopher The Film from Phillip McReynolds on Vimeo.

I will see Source Code once it hits the Cinema Saver.