Re: [-empyre-] speaking of film.. and global art industry (and cultural nationalism)

[The Paul Annears <the.paul.annears@gmail.com>]

Well, yes, to answer that question, it is rugby.  Anything done which
invites one other entity the party is a game of two halves.

But not only that there are so many different ways to write, to
express, for example, enthusiasm.

Last time I was in Delhi I was so thankful that I had got that far on
the Aeroflot vibrator in the sky that I got of the Bangkok Moscow
flight and kissed the wet balckness of the tarmac.

Today, earlier, for lunch with a dear old friend I was discussing
Rajasthan, Dehli was mentioned as the place to get the train.  It must
be more wonderful than that, I'm sure.

As for focusing on Aotearoa / New Zealand, that may be the given or
suggested topic but it cannot be what defines our conversation..

That would be rather like watching the Tsunami on the telly.

A P A








On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 17:24:15 +1100, Danny Butt <db@dannybutt.net> wrote:
> [i think this is a bit late on the discussion cause i've been offline - and
> apologies for the incoherence, i'm suffering from some "embodied limits to
> cosmopolitanism" in the form of a stomach bug brought back from delhi]
> 
> Thanks Melinda for raising  NZ film, which I think opens a number of
> productive questions of relevance to new media arts production. This is
> perhaps sharpened from having just left India where Bollywood cinema seems
> to open similar questions about culture, authenticity, anti-colonialism,
> genre and transnational capital. Of course I know next to nothing about
> Bollywood cinema outside of the economics (and even there not much) so I
> won't comment on that, though I'd be very interested to hear from others.
> But it was interesting that on my Singapore Air flights, featuring 60 movies
> "on demand", about *20%* of the screens where watching The Whale Rider,
> which was in the "favourites" category!
> 
> That it should be so successful - I am sure that it will have a longer shelf
> life than Once Were Warriors -  is not surprising. It has a small girl
> individually battling non-Western patriarchy, a staple of cultural
> consumption in Euro-US, ignoring that the Ngati Porou tribe actually have a
> long history of female warriors and a tradition of allowing women to speak
> on the marae. It has the beautiful East Coast landscape. The socio-economic
> struggles of Maori in the film are stripped from the context of
> colonisation, removing from Western consciousness any responsibility for its
> role in creating the conditions in which the individualist narrative is
> played out. There are Animals (though, interestingly, the perspective of the
> whales themselves plays a much stronger role in Ihimaera's book).  Disney
> have with their usual skill compressed the book's complex conflicts into
> recognisable and resolvable vignettes.  This is assisted by having Lisa
> Gerard (Dead Can Dance and now a major auteur figure in Hollywood film
> composition) score the film, a factor in its success that should not be
> underestimated given Maori culture's rich tradition of evocative music that
> *in theory* could have accompanied the film (I would say that if Richard
> Nunns did the music the film would have been dumped on the arthouse circuit
> immediately, while being a lot better). It's a well-made film, even seeing
> it for the third time, it's moving and compelling, and I would probably like
> it even if I didn't have an entirely other set of connections to the story
> and location that raise questions about it as a cultural product.
> 
> But against the simple recognition of "being up there with the best" that
> The Paul Annears raise (what is this, rugby?) there are a number of
> questions that I think would help us understand what allows it to be seen as
> a "quality" product by international film distributors and audiences. They
> are not dissimilar to those raised by films like Tamahori's OWW, or the
> circulation of new media art from India in Euro-US circles. The other day at
> Sarai Mumbai curator Nancy Adajani (who I hope will publish on this)
> described a dynamic of "location" and "extension" that accompanies the
> production, circulation, and reception of artists such as Raqs Media
> Collective and Shilpa Gupta. I wouldn't summarise her complex argument, but
> I would say that I thought this formulation very powerful: with the emphasis
> that these senses of "location" are cultural in nature (not "locative media"
> as GPS in the way it's been used in new media arts circles) and that the
> capacities to "extend" one's own "antennae" toward other locations are
> unevenly distributed. In other words, as usual, it is those marginalised by
> Euro-US hegemony who do the bulk of the labour of extension toward other
> audiences, practitioners, and subject positions. The dialectics of
> recognition and assimilation within this dynamic are well described by
> Fanon.
> 
> The implications of these dynamics have very concrete outcomes. Let's take
> the example of Whangara, the community who allowed their story to extend
> into the field of transnational cinema in the Whale Rider. Concrete outcomes
> have included a whole bunch of people blundering over gates to take
> inappropriate, unauthorised photos of film locations. Such is the public
> circulation of culture. The local real estate agent noted the sharp increase
> in the number of British and South African subjects migrating to the region
> in the last two years, pushing up property values, thus local property
> rates/taxes, a dynamic that will inevitably result in poor local families
> needing to sell and move, is a well-known dynamic in other areas where land
> has been promoted through global media. These stories do not obviously get
> the same level of circulation, yet they are part of the picture. One hopes
> that new media arts in NZ (or new context media as Adajani calls it) can
> address these issues with some reflexivity.
> 
> Films like OWW and Whale Rider allow us to inoculate ourselves against the
> violence of colonisation (Barthes and Sandoval are very good on this).
> Indigeneity is disembedded into a dynamic of failure to become a proper
> economic subject, or romantically appropriated as the loss entailed in
> entering modernity. In both these films, the relationships between the
> directors and indigenous communities were well documented in the press which
> of course obscures the dynamics at work in transnational film productions,
> where everyone knows that the director's involvement in editing is not
> always a given. We could move the discussion then, from a whether Tamahori,
> as a Maori who "looks white" by his own account is adequately Maori; or Niki
> Caro's ability to represent the story of Witi Ihimaera, to the longer
> histories and backgrounds to how these works get made. What kind of
> "extension" from the urban Maoridom depicted in OWW is required by Tamahori
> to make the film? Where is he located in relation to this material? Hint:
> his framing of Maori-ness as "racial" rather than "cultural" should give us
> a clue to his prior success in the commercial media industry. I'd also love
> to see not just a directors cut but a "Whangara remix" of the Whale Rider by
> the people there (of course, Disney's rabid IP protection would prevent
> this, cf. their legal efforts of Dorfman and Mattelart's "How to read Donald
> Duck). To what extent can white culture "extend" to not just incorporating
> the stories as a "product" (whether for films or when curating exhibitions)
> but to begin a lasting process of dialogue where our priorities are able to
> be transformed by the encounter?
> 
> To get an idea of the dynamics at work, I think it's useful to consider the
> muted criticism of the Whale Rider from within NZ. I believe Merata Mita
> subtly raised the question of why a white film maker has to direct it (easy
> answer: the director must focus the story to move the target audience, which
> requires cultural identification), but there has not been the kind of
> critique Pihama raised about the Piano:
> http://www.thepeoplespaths.net/articles/maori.htm
> My conversations suggest that for a number of Maori, they are simply
> relieved to have a more positive - however artificial - first impression of
> their people circulating in international media channels, instead of
> Warriors being the dominant image. But that is far from the end of the
> complex dynamics of neocolonialism exemplified by New Zealand's
> participation  in global media culture.
> 
> I relation to whether state funding is required to secure "national
> cultures" in the peripheries: the more I review the history of indigenous
> relations in Australia and NZ, and the more I familiarise myself with the
> practices of indigenous media makers, the more I believe that cultural
> nationalism in all its forms is the main source of disenfranchisement for
> marginalised groups, who fail to achieve status as "unmarked human
> citizens". I imagine from it's history that empyre - like most new media
> gatherings - is dominated by the white middle classes like myself, and there
> is a very strong cultural trope we are taught that positions state-funded
> national cultural development against the evils of globalisation; and that
> supporting the middle classes to make quirky, "culturally specific" forms of
> established genres (that hopefully nevertheless function as
> rehearsals/training for "real global media" i.e. cultural exports) is
> something that those who are "culturally aware" should appreciate. Anyone
> from Australasia should think about what benefit indigenous media
> practitioners have received from the "quota systems" established on
> broadcasting channels, requiring the provision of "local content". The
> answer, of course, is almost zero, with the various, excellent, NZ
> initiatives only stemming from Treaty of Waitangi obligations and political
> pressure. Because if the indigenous is treated as local, suddenly there is
> something "less local" - not good for national "cultural security!". Free
> the airwaves, ditch the madness of spectrum auctions and the commodification
> of the air in the name of the state, and let's really see what constitutes
> the media of our so called "liberal multiculturalism", which is perhaps
> another word for white power.
> 
> So to finish this rant I say, seriously/not-seriously, let's not just open
> up the airwaves, let's open up cultural funding on an "all comers" basis,
> regardless of nationality. Of course we may want to make cultural justice
> one of our criteria. But these are not national issues, and cultural
> nationalism is a bad hangover that's wrecking many areas of public life
> (let's remember that until recently polynesian hip-hop was often lamented as
> Americanisation in white NZ, rather than the expansive, joyful positioning
> of the local into a global black struggle that it has always been for the
> practitioners). I've got to admit a feeling of concern about the topic of
> discussion this month focussing on a nation-state, even one I call my home!
> 
> x.d
> 
> --
> http://www.dannybutt.net
> 
> #place: location, cultural politics, and social technologies:
> http://www.place.net.nz
> 
> [ Lilith] laughed bitterly. "I suppose I could think of this as fieldwork -
> but how the hell do I get out of the field ?" (Octavia E. Butler, _Dawn_)
> 
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-- 
The Paul Annears
www.xxos.net