Two legitimate responses to the excesses of 21st century capitalist imperialism and its attendant populist gaslighting include contemplative withdrawal or confrontational fury. The music by the artists at the 15th edition of the three day Transmissions festival (Tagline: “Exploring the sound”) in Ravenna, Italy provided potent examples of both.
In the foyer of Teatro Rasi, the festival venue, was a small exhibition of mobile phone photos taken by Adriano Zanni. These are shots of the petrochemical plant in Ravenna’s Piallassa Valley which Michelangelo Antonioni used as the setting for his celebrated film ‘Red Desert’ (Il Desert Rosso) in 1964. Writing about this film for The Village Voice in 2017, Bilge Ebiri states that Antonioni’s vision “can never be reduced to simple laments for the spiritual pollution of the world.” Zanni quotes the Italian director as saying that “even factories can be equipped with great beauty” and his ‘ Red Desert Chronicles’ portfolio is presented in romanticized terms as “a theatre of dreams and hopes, toil and work, a stage of majestic grandeur.”
Last month, during a one week trip to London, I spent around three hours happily immersed in several multi-screen presentations of Isaac Julien’s films at the ‘What Freedom Means To Me’ exhibition at Tate Britain.
The film that made the biggest impression on me was ‘Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement’ from 2019, based around the life of the Italian-Brazilian modernist architect who died in 1992 aged 78. If you want to know what dancing about architecture looks like, you should watch this!
Bo Bardi is played by two actresses, movingly contrasting her as a young and older woman. The older self is played by Brazilian stage, television and film actress Fernanda Montenegro who, at the end of the film, recites lines from Bo Bardi’s correspondence in the form of a poem: “Linear time is a western invention. Time is not linear, it is a marvellous entanglement, where at any moment, points can be chosen and solutions invented, without beginning or end.”
Angela Rodel and Georgi Gospodinov
These words resonated with me and I think subconsciously prompted me to purchase a copy of Time Shelter (Времеубежище) by Georgi Gospodinov which was on prominent display in Foyles Bookshop as the winner of this year’s International Booker Prize . The novel was translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel and is Gospodinov’s third novel to be published in English.
THE LAST OF ENGLAND directed by Derek Jarman (UK, 1988
“It’s a love story with England. It’s not an attack.It’s an attack on those things that I believe personally are things without value.” Derek Jarman in an interview with Chris Lippard
Derek Jarman was a war child; conceived during the period of the London blitz and born on January 31st 1942. It is perhaps no surprise to find that the spectre of WWII dominates his imagination and helped inspire his surreal poetic documentary ‘The Last of England’ made in the Spring of 1987.
Jarman was in his mid-40s when he completed the film which graphically depicts a post-war and post-apocalyptic urban wasteland. While making it he was diagnosed as HIV positive. This illness was for him another battle which he waged publicly. He announced his diagnosis to the world rather than be shamed into silence. The full-blown AIDS virus would end his life prematurely six years later.
The contagion may have partly accounted for his rage but it was in him anyway. “Where’s hope? Have they killed it” are rhetorical questions asked in a movie. “Yes” comes the blunt reply. “And tomorrow?” the unseen speaker asks. The answer comes in the form of a quote from graffiti Jarman had seen scrawled on a wall in London’s Euston Road: “Tomorrow is cancelled due to lack of interest”.
This brief exchange is practically the only dialogue in a movie that evolved through improvisation; there was no screenplay. Aside from Jarman’s freeform poems (read by Nigel Terry) , most of the movie plays out without words. The director’s obscure diatribes offer few clues about his intentions. They are more full of attitude than meaning. The critic David L.Hirst called the end result “an apocalyptic roar of a movie.”
When Bella Cherry (not her real name) arrives in America from Sweden, the customs officer asks if her visit is for business or pleasure. Bella replies “Pleasure” with a wry smile. After watching this movie, I’d say she gave the wrong answer. Having lots of sex would normally count as a pleasurable activity but when this is done for money in a mechanical, ritualistic manner then, just as in prostitution, it falls squarely into the category of business.
It is soon clear that Thyberg’s objective is not to make a feminist movie or to criticise pornography. We see a male dominated world in which the women consent to be exploited and abused knowing full well the implications and content of the encounters beforehand.
The Will To Change – Men, Masculinity and Love by bell hooks (Simon & Schuster, 2004)
Every man and woman, together wit those of undecided gender, should read this book. Wary men fearful of yet another feminist tract telling them how shit they are can breathe a sigh of relief.
bell hooks, real name Gloria Jean Watkins, wanted her pen name to be written in lower case so that people focus on her books, not her identity. She said : “I think we are obsessed in the U.S. with the personal in ways that blind us to more important issues of life.”
I confess that I have been unforgivably ignorant of the importance of her writing until very recently. With a crushing irony, my belated discovery came just a couple of months before she sadly passed away at the age of 69. The only positive that might come from her death is that her works will be republished and freshly promoted. Hers is a radical voice for our times with refreshingly inclusive insights such as the recognition that “sexist exploitation [will] not change unless men [are] also deeply engaged in feminist resistance.”
This is a book aimed primarily at changing men but hooks is insistent that this transformation will not happen without a fundamental shift in female attitudes. She is most critical of those sisters who fail to appreciate that men are as much victims of patriarchal culture as they are. Of course, she is not blind to be fact that men benefit most from the system but urges women to make a vital distinction between masculinity and patriarchy. Maleness needs to divorced from the dominator model and to avoid all doubt on the roots of the problem and the scale of the challenge, she proposes the all embracive term “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”
In this study, bell hooks defines patriarchy as “a social disease assaulting the male body and spirit” whilst noting that men who are aware of this often find themselves isolated from other men. This certainly rings true for me personally. In the 1990s, I joined a men’s group which took Robert Bly’s ‘Iron John’ as a sacred text. In this environment, it was obvious that it was far from empowering for us ‘reconstructed males’ to declare ourselves as feminists. The overriding suspicion was that people like us were engaging in sexual politics to further our own ends rather than to truly embrace equality between the sexes. The consequence was that the so called ‘new man’ found himself between a rock and a hard place. Crucially, it didn’t pass unnoticed that unreconstructed males got laid more often and achieved a greater social status more easily.
Gloria Jean Watkins aka bell hooks (September 25, 1952 – December 15, 2021)
Writing from a black female perspective, bell hooks is right to observe that her feminist peers strive to win the rewards and privileges of men in positions of power rather than suffer the slings and arrows of misfortune at the other end of the social scale. In so doing, they are merely helping to perpetuate the patriarchal model rather than working to dismantle it. On top of this, hooks concedes that women are capable of being as emotionally abusive as their male counterparts. She writes that “[they] have not proven that they care enough about the hearts of men” reasoning that “it is better to be a dominator than dominated”.
The overriding message of this book is it is only through co-operation and mutual support between men and women that positive change will come about. Taking an unfashionably non-sceptical stance, she asserts that love can transform domination and that feminist writing, whether fiction or theory, should be centred on the premise that “It is possible to critique patriarchy without hating men.”
