Category Archives: 04. other, a hesitant smile

l. Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing

THE ACT OF KILLING

Joshua Oppenheimer, Indonesia
2013, 2 min 41 sec

A documentary that challenges former Indonesian death squad leaders to reenact their real-life mass-killings in whichever cinematic genres they wish, including classic Hollywood crime scenarios and lavish musical numbers.

* summary & further research

Jean Rouch: Les Maîtres fous

04. OTHER, A HESITANT SMILE

[ON OTHERING, THE RETURN GAZE AND THE POSSIBILITY OF OTHER]

This module questions modes of ‘othering’ and rethinks the geo-political economies of knowledge and power, lived and viewed from ‘elsewhere’. Revaluating the cultural and political understandings of the world today, it explores the historical formations and political configurations of multiple ways of storytelling and how divergent knowledge and practices make worlds and overcomes ‘othering’ caught between the parameters of power and inequality. How can we open up possibilities for a pluriverse, a cosmos composed through divergent practices of storytelling and the emergence, transformation, and differentiation of a variety of uses of time.

FURTHER READING & RESEARCH

Marisol de la Cadena & Mario Blaser, Eds.: A World of Many Worlds (2018)

Vijay Prashad,  The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (2009); The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (2012)

 Constance Penley, Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel, and Janet Bergstrom, eds. Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction (1991)

David Abrams: The Spell of the Sensous  (1996)

Glenn Aparicio Parry: Original Thinking: A Radical ReVisioning of Time, Humanity, and Nature (2015)

 Saadawi, Ahmed, Frankenstein in Baghdad (2018)

 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (2014)

 Chambers, Iain, Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities (2017)

 Ursula Münster, Thom van Dooren, Sara Asu Schroer, & Hugo Reinert, eds. Multispecies Care in the Sixth Extinction; a collection of short essays in “Theorizing the Contemporary”  (2021)

Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren & Matthew Chrulew, eds., Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death and Generations (2017)

Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other, How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983/2014)

Eric Michaels, For a cultural future: Francis Jupurrurla makes TV at Yuendumu (1987)

 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics (2014)

Helen Macdonald, Falcon (2006)

Jean Rouch, First Film (1947-1991)

Mark Dion on the Economics of Smurf Society and Why is there only one Smurfette (Paper Tiger TV, 1991)

Thom Andersen,  Los Angeles Plays itself, (2008)

Chris Marker, La Jetee (1962) 

Alfred HitchcockVERTIGO (1958)

Rea Tajiri, History and Memory  (2020)


FURTHER RESOURCES

12 monkeys movie theater scene of Hitchcock’s VERTIGO

Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons (1993)

New Media Projects at Yuendumu: Inter-cultural engagement and self-determination in an era of accelerated globalization: Continuum: Vol 16, No 2, 2010

m. Chris Cunningham, Spectral Musicians

SPECTRAL MUSICIANS

Chris Cunningham
2019, 
4 min 59 sec

This is a short film made by Chris Cunningham (best known for the Aphex Twin music videos) for Warp Records sometime in the mid-2000s. I spliced together some handheld audience footage and about a minute of video that I found on the Vimeo channel of one of the original editors of the short: https://vimeo.com/39202335

n. Eduardo Galiano, kiss-o-drome

KISS-O-DROME

Johan Grimonprez, Belgium
story written & narrated by Eduardo Galeano
fragment from Shadow World
2016, 1 min 16 sec

In 1980 an extraordinary demonstration hit the streets of the Brazilian city of Sorocaba. Under the military dictatorship, a court had outlawed kisses that undermined public morals. The ruling by Judge Manuel Moralles, which punished such kisses with jail terms, described them this way: “some kisses are libidinous and therefore obscene, like a kiss on the neck, on the private parts, etc., and like the cinematographic kiss in which the labial mucosa come together in an unsophismable expansion of sensuality.” The city responded by becoming one huge kissodrome. Never had people kissed so much. Prohibition sparked desire and many were those who out of simple curiosity wanted a taste of the unsophismable kiss.