Archive for the ‘Film’ Category
Rockhaunter — Dubjective Hauntology in Sound and Vision
I’d wasted more than half my life listening out for the ultimate monster earthquake history-killing punk-blues teenage feedback riff-fuck. And I’d wasted more than the other half trying to make music from unitary sounds I’d collected in my conscious fear of their presence. At some point in the past decade I stopped collecting songs and listening out for patterns and started describing the imaginary music that had left its constantly replaying imprint on me. All of a sudden, over a period of three or four years, I became dizzy with the truth: the finest tunes exist in the imagination.
I and I (and, indeed, I) am thee Rockhaunter. Keen hauntiquaries, or hauntiquarians, we poke into and recreate antiquarian sounds in our imaginings and in uttering thoughts about them. I’m no specialist, so I can’t get with “hauntology” — although I grok it and groove on its skittering blueprint surface. Also, I don’t simply regard the sublime and then cast theory with genuflections: I swim and cavort in it. I don’t consider the shadow tracks of unknown sounds as the memories of things that have never been present: in my dubjective sensing, these are unheeded frequencies. I don’t categorise the Unexplained or the Reimagined as monolithic footnotes to ‘the weird’ or ‘the uncanny’: I let the voices talk through my ventriloquising.
Is hauntology in music and visual culture a reinvention of historicism with weird contingencies replacing science? Why do hauntologists seek place-specificity? What makes hauntology different from psychogeography, deep topography or general critical theory? How is hauntology different from other re-educationalist projects in popular culture (like psychogeography and record collecting) that tackle both nostalgia and entrenched academicism head on with purposeful revisionism?
My hauntiquarian nose smells an attempt by radical minds to create an imaginary national epic of collective possibilities. I wonder what such an epic would sound like.
Watch me now. I’m thee Rockhaunter. The ghostly harmony killer. Versioning the people. With a sheet over my head.
Coming soon:— Rockhaunter, No. 1, Halloween Hauntology Special
Posted by Neil
on September 21, 2007 at 7:56 pm
Tags: Film, Music, Proletarian Postmodernism, Spatiality, antiquarianism, hauntiquarianism, hauntology, ventriloquism
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Vinh Linh Steel Bastion (1970)
I’ve just remembered a great film. Search for Luy Thep Vinh Lin or Vinh Linh Steel Bastion (1970), a great North Vietnamese propaganda film about the much-bombed area of Vinh Linh. It was directed by — I think — Ngoc Quynh and was otherwise known in English as Vinh Linh Steel Ramparts. I caught it when it was shown on TV in the early 1990s and it had a profound effect on me.
It must have been good, because it won Gold Lotus prize at the 2nd Vietnamese film festival, 1973 and Gold Medal at the 1971 Moscow international film festival. Read more about Vietnamese films from 1945 to 1975.
“Vinh Linh had no defences. It had no steel ramparts or automated protection. It didn’t even have barbed wire.”
Posted by Neil
on September 10, 2007 at 9:48 am
Tags: Film, Vietnam
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