[-empyre-] Savage Nights

["Ollivier Dyens" <odyens@hotmail.com>]

Hi everyone,

This morning, as I was preparing tomorrow's film class on "Les Nuits Fauves"
(Savage Nights)
http://movie-reviews.colossus.net/movies/s/savage_nights.html
this great French movie of the early 90's, a realization came to me: the
overwhelming anguish that reverberates through this film (it's the story of
a young, bisexual man, infected with AIDS. Yes, the story line is quite
commonplace, but the form of the film, its emphasis on movement, speed,
violence and sexuality, are, to me, a perfect illustration of today's
constant experiments with ontology) is quite in tune with what we've
discussed in the last 4 weeks. Savage Nights is a film in total freefall, a
film that you cannot completely, distinctively take hold off. Savage Nights
is like a whirlwind, a centrifugal form that's both present, concrete and
immaterial. And what's so interesting about this film is that the need for
redefinition is both the cause and the center of the whirlwind, it's both
visible, concrete (it creates all sort of emotional and physical violence)
and immaterial, virtual. Savage Night's emphasis on AIDS is another
interesting phenomenon: AIDS is latent, it's not a disease per se but an
impossibility of defining (immunity wise) oneself, AIDS is invisible but
dangerous and present. In this film, anguish, desperation and even torment
are diffuse, difficult to clearly understand and delineate. This film tries
to give sense to its surrounding world by plunging head first into violent
movements (of sounds, images, sexual relationship, etc.). It's as if the
film said "The world is too complicated for me to make sense of it in a
normal way. To understand the world, I have to define it as I go, I have to
encode and decode it through and with its own frenetical pace".

The film's strange editing (the director consciously asked the editor to
break up any scene that was too clearly narrative), the film's strange pace,
its characters strange behaviors (they can only give meaning to their life
through their own destruction) and narrativity is a clear example of what we
are all trying to do: redefine our place and understanding of the world
through a new set of images, a new rhythm, a new violence, a new
confrontational relationship between ourselves and the many-layered world
around us. What seems like random conversation when we discuss things (art,
cyberculture, politics, whatever) is more the act of redefining itself. We'
ve all been concerned with our relationship to space (3d, 2d, the richness,
or absence, of it) and we've all come up with different ways of
understanding and defining it. Let me suggest one last one: space must now
be defined by the act of defining it. Space must now be understood by the
act of looking at it. Like the characters in Savage nights, we define and
give meaning to the world as we walk, or run though it, as we destroy or
protect it. Everything is now made to exist as we go along. Art, sexuality,
gender, politics, the nation-state, etc, all these phenomenon are being
deconstructed and reconstructed as we go along. And every definition is
different.

Our mistake is, I believe, trying to define art, or cyberart, netart,
whatever and give it a understandable contour, something we can debate and
position ourselves around. The act of defining is the definition itself.
There is no netart to define, but millions of definitions making up the
netart process. And because our world makes many things visible, our own
definition clashes against other's, constantly. Like the characters in
Savage Nights, we now live in a freefalling world, where life, death, space,
time and continuity are constantly being challenged. But this challenge is
the actual understanding.

We are caught in the middle of a great representational (of course) but also
biological and ontological hurricane.