Irréversible, of Paris-based Argentine filmmaker Gaspar Noé, is absolutely terrifying and terrifyingly well-done. It is the story of vengeance, attempted by Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre (Albert Dupontel), subsequent to the rape and assault of Alex (Monica Bellucci), the former’s girlfriend and the latter’s ex. Because of its experimental quality and unapologetic brutality— namely, a graphic scene in which a man is visibly bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher and a 10-minute long uncut rape scene—many people have found it in the least blasphemous and at most unbearable enough to leave the theater. In fact, its screening at the 2002 Cannes Festival was a major scandal, with almost all of the audience members leaving at one point or another. I, in the first couple of days of seeing it, was still haunted by Noé’s images and in awe of the emotion and determination to write that he had compelled in me.Irréversible, of Paris-based Argentine filmmaker Gaspar Noé, is absolutely terrifying and terrifyingly well-done. It is the story of vengeance, attempted by Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre (Albert Dupontel), subsequent to the rape and assault of Alex (Monica Bellucci), the former’s girlfriend and the latter’s ex. Because of its experimental quality and unapologetic brutality— namely, a graphic scene in which a man is visibly bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher and a 10-minute long uncut rape scene—many people have found it in the least blasphemous and at most unbearable enough to leave the theater. In fact, its screening at the 2002 Cannes Festival was a major scandal, with almost all of the audience members leaving at one point or another. I, in the first couple of days of seeing it, was still haunted by Noé’s images and in awe of the emotion and determination to write that he had compelled in me.
Where to begin? Irréversible is true to its title in its two definitions: it recounts an unrepairable event and does so in a reverse chronology. Thus, it focuses not on the aftermath, but on the event itself and forces the audience to live through each moment with the characters. Noé is particularly successful in the creation of his film world, as he chose to depict a niche underground culture, that of the tenth arrondissement of Paris. Through his choice of language, he demonstrates the contemporary racial and cultural identity of this ‘ghetto’ Parisian neighborhood that is home to immigrants, minority groups, and poverty, a direct result of recent gentrification. In a rage of hate, on a hunt to track down Alex’s aggressor, Marcus speaks in a vulgar familiar language, constantly cursing and throwing out racial slurs. He and Pierre get into a cab of an Asian driver, which ends with Marcus yelling niakoué (‘gook’), and espèce de chinois (‘chink’). Furthermore, he is told that the alleged aggressor can be found at a gay club, inciting him to say pédé (‘fag’) almost every minute of the first half of the film. Perhaps the French slur is meaner than the English, for it comes from the word pédéraste, designating the older man in the ancient greek relationship between him and an adolescent boy, but also is a close homophone to pédophile. The rapist himself uses such language, calling Alex gonzesse (‘chick’) and petite bourgeoise (‘little rich girl’). His words reveal that he not only belongs to a low social class, but also has a personal, uncalled for hate for the bourgeois. Hearing such vulgarity, simultaneously makes the audience tense and authentically expresses social tensions of modern-day Paris.
In fact, Noé quite crudely calls attention to numerous social and political issues through his narrative choices and his transparency, notably his use of shots in real time. As the director, writer, producer, and editor of this film, even the smallest details were conscious decisions on his part. He likes to provoke. He reveals to his spectators their moral positions; his depiction of sexual assault brings into question women’s rights, his blatant homophobia asks that of gay rights, and his idea of vengeance challenges the notion of legal justice. Once Alex is found and taken away by an ambulance, Pierre and Marcus are questioned by the police but unable to provide any information because Alex had left a party that they were at earlier. Immediately after the questioning, two men come up to them offering Alex’s aggressor’s name for money. One of them says, “La vengeance est le droit de l’homme,” “Vengeance is the right of every man.” He goes on to explain that cases like this have happened before and that the policemen are inadequate—they’re not that interested in finding him and even if they do, they will put him in prison, where the aggressor will have free clothes and free meals. This is a story about men taking what they believe is rightfully theirs, about a man’s choice. The sexual assault scene needs to be ten minutes long because this is a reoccurring incident in our society that many people like to gloss over or be in denial about. Perhaps the most significant moment of the film is when from the top-right corner of the frame, you can see a vague blur of a man come into the tunnel, realize what’s happening, and leave. It’s awful. It’s sickening. Yet we need to address it. As Perkins observed, “A movie cannot be both absolutely self-contained and meaningful. It draws non-stop on the values and knowledge which we bring to it. Recognition and interpretation of the film’s experience both depend on an immediate responsiveness at the level where meaning is given rather than created.” Noé shows us our hatred and violence in the ugliest manner, urging us to reflect and speak up...
L. H. M. Ling’s The Dao of World Politics perfectly blends storytelling with policy analysis to present, and perhaps exemplify, an alternate approach to the currently Western-dominated discipline of international affairs: worldism. Drawing from Daoist and Buddhist principles, worldism is not a call for unification or diversification, but rather, reconciliation. Rooted in ideas of balance, fluidity, and multiplicity, it aims to reconcile Westphalia, Western nations and schools of thought, with Multiple Worlds, those that don’t fit into the description—i. e. the majority of the world.
The book is organized into three parts: an explanation of wordlist dialogics, its application in US-China, China-Taiwan, China-India relations as example, and a concluding play that offers an unconventional reading experience of the content covered in previous sections. Combining food, folklore, pop culture, philosophy, and medicine, Ling demonstrates, in both structure and content, how to take into account the social relations of nation-states (relationality: who is saying what to whom and why?), how to analyse the production of knowledge we consume (resonance: where are alternative discourses coming from and what do these mean?), and how to effectively communicate with one another (interbeing: how can I act ethnically and with compassion?), what she calls ‘the three elements of the worldist zone of engagement’ (20). She is particularly successful in the coinage of her own terms, her epistemological deconstruction of Western thought, and her incorporation of multiple writing genres and academic fields.
Western hegemony is widely recognised, but the terminology to commonly identify, express, and discuss this phenomenon is not. Decoloniality is still ill-defined, and those writing on it stumble between West/Rest, Global North/Global South, and core/periphery vocabulary, all words that come with inevitable connotations of hierarchy. We don’t have the right words to speak about it, so Ling has gone ahead and adopted her own terms for us to use. It is in this process of naming that space is created to construct a narrative uninfluenced by the West. As words only appear out of necessity and are maintained through the consensus of a community of speakers, her coinage of ‘Westphalia,’ ‘Multiple Worlds,’ and ‘worldism’ evinces the urgent need for decolonisation across disciplines and provides the language for scholars to talk about it...
Union jack! Underground! Double-decker bus! Big Ben! Has London come to mind yet? The rise of visual and media culture in the 20th and 21st Century has transformed visual signs into a universal language of communication. In every city, we are endlessly bombarded by words and images that inform our perception—road signs dictate how we move, advertisements influence what we consume, and corporate logos change how we regard certain products. Visual language is coded; we as individuals did not create these mental associations, yet we are subjected to them. By imagining a bright-red roundel, a classic-blue box, and simple white lettering, the idea of London pops into our minds. Can basic graphic elements, a logo and a typeface, embody the identity of an entire city? If so, what are the mental associations that communicate an urban identity, and how have we learned to interpret them visually?
This paper will deconstruct the meaning and demonstrate the capacity of visual signs using the example of the London Underground’s visual identity, a logo and typeface which have endured since their creation more than a hundred years ago, becoming postcard-worthy icons of their native city along the way. This journey began in 1916, when Edward Johnston created a roundel logo and a typeface called Johnston Sans as a commision from London’s Underground railway. The corporation hoped to consolidate their image in order to be visually easy to navigate and to thus, drive up fare income, as it had recently merged with a number of different companies. Hand-drawn and first used as wood-block prints, the Johnston Sans typeface was inspired by Roman capital letters of the Trajan’s military victory column in Rome to be simple and easily readable. To achieve this end, Johnston applied equal proportions to the letters and decided against serifs, the decorative ends of strokes, in a time when the opposite style, Victorian handwriting, was all the rage. Thus, it was one of the first widely used sans serif typefaces, although its public licensing has caused the work of Johnston’s pupil, Gill Sans, to be better known today. Both of Johnston’s creations are considered to be “one of the most widely accepted mental images of the city” and a “design which screams ‘London!’, no matter which language you speak.” They work together to form an urban graphic object, a visual representation of a mental concept that employs graphic elements and functions in an urban environment...
Redefining Hong Kong Through an Aesthetic of In-Between
The past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct. This is the inter-title that ends In the Mood for Love (2000). Along with atmospheric lighting, late-night cityscapes, kinetic camerawork, saturated colors, and sensuous soundtracks, nostalgia is central to the cinema of Wong Kar-wai, a renowned contemporary Hong Kongese film director so avant-garde and distinctive in his style that his title as an auteur is widely agreed upon. As he is notorious for filming without a finished script and having shooting ratios so high that sometimes the entire plot is cut from the final film, it is safe to say that his films are most likely prized for a purely aesthetic reason: “Performance in Wong’s cinema becomes integrally absorbed into a sensuous aesthetic.” Analysis of four images from Fallen Angels (1995), Chungking Express (1994), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004) will investigate how he uses formal attributes to represent time and space. Subsequently, I will be looking into how this spatio-temporal representation evokes feelings of loss, loneliness, and nostalgia, and finally, how this sentiment fosters a new cultural identity unique to Hong Kong, given the geopolitics of Hong Kong at the time.
I would also like to present his work as an exemplar of cinema in a globalised world, of a transnational cinema. In "Film Theory and Spectatorship in the Age of the ‘Posts,’” Robert Stam and Ella Habiba Shohat argue that contemporary media is “at the very core of identity production,”for it is essential to our discourse and understanding of multiculturalism, post-colonialism, transnationalism, and globalisation today, and call for cultural heterogeneity. In spite of the fact that the majority of cinemas and of film production in the world annually belong to the so-called ‘foreign film’ category (cinemas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America), this number is not proportionally represented in film screenings around the world nor in film studies, “enabling the imperial countries to monitor global communications and shape the image of world events...”
Larry Johnson (1959-) is a Los Angeles-based artist concerned with themes of “death, celebrity, class, camp, lust, nostalgia, and obsolescence,” as summarised by Russel Ferguson for the Hammer Museum. His work is “an idiosyncratic amalgam of popular history, text-based narrative, graphic design, and class awareness” according to the David Kordansky Gallery. As an ode to Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’”, I thought to continue image analysis in the form of ‘jottings,’ examining three topics: camp and language, language and collage, and structure and composition.
Camp and Language
• Growing up in Los Angeles, Johnson saw that contemporary American culture was becoming more and more inextricably entwined with Hollywood and its celebrities, to the point that he believed, “To master celebrity is to master language.”
• He believed celebrity and camp were the language of our time, rewriting the commonly accepted ideas and trends we had before, but also being vulnerable to being rewritten itself.
• His works make a commentary on this contemporary culture through the use of borrowed icons and the carton illustration aesthetic, most often addressing the politics of social strata and of queerness.
• As camp is an aesthetic that sees value purely in the visual, his works seem to mimic this idea, taking text and language in a purely pictorial sense. There is also the similarity of irony in the two aesthetics.
Language and collaging
• Photography is his chosen medium, but it is not the photography we think of. He uses it more like collage, combining different visual elements together; in his winter landscape series, he puts together clever texts and well-known winter landscapes from modern media sources (such as stills from Scooby Do or Bambi) and famed Japanese artists (Hokusai and Hiroshige).
• Reasoning: “In this predigital period Johnson had a day job producing network graphics for television, so he was familiar with how to put together painted eels, mular, and covered paper to make a convincing whole to be photographed." (Ferguson)
• Reasoning: He likes to write dark comedy, and upon writing such humorous shorts, he realized that he needed ‘an environment to exist in.’
• Untitled (H) includes a quote (“A homo hipster whose hard-core habit and hard-fought holler for help hailed form the hallowed halls of higher learning”) from the television series, Hard Copy, and speaks of heroin addiction, taken inspiration from a friend of his who blames his drug usage on the pressure of Ivy League schools. Aside from this quote, he wrote the rest of the text; he includes his own narratives in his photographs.
• Untitled (Classically Tragic Story) takes into question the murders, incited by Charles Manson’s followers, of actress Sharon Tate among others.
Structure and composition
• In our class about vision about gaze, we talked about the frame implying choice and rendering visible certain choices of the artist. Johnson’s winter landscapes are look simple and perfect from afar, but the reality evoked by his texts convey the exact opposite. He’s very witty.
• His choice of landscapes seem to be political, given that "Johnson objects to the semiotic model that posits vertical as portrait and assertive, and horizontal as landscape and passive. Here the two formats are simply stuck together in a combination that might perhaps be called passive aggressive." (Ferguson)
• He apparently had initial interest in structuralism, which makes a lot of sense. From what I’ve briefly researched about it, it is about the relationship of the conditions (most often, of the contrast) that brings about meaning, for meaning was believed to be something external and not carried within objects and images. There is also an idea of separation between the surface that we perceive as ‘real’ and the underlying ‘real’ meaning.
Conclusion
• His works are a play on contrast, on this separation between facade and essence that he saw all around him in his Californian childhood.
• He pokes fun and uses humour, both in text and images (as his images are often from cartoons, an image intended as ‘comedic’) maybe because his world has never made sense to him. I didn’t focus on the theme of death present in his works, but is said to relate to the AIDS epidemic, and he has previously said that his work means something different to gay men than to any other spectator.
• At least to me, his works seem to touch upon the question we all ask ourselves at one point or another: why do bad things happen to good people?
Untitled (Classically Tragic Story), 1991
Confessions
Collected Anonymously at the Sorbonne
I smoke without the consent of my parents.
I ignored a girl that was crushing on me because she didn’t interest me.
I had sex with the girlfriend of my ex-best friend.
I once stole in a supermarket.
I always feel overwhelmed even when I have very little to do.
It occurs that I eat a lot of snacks because of greed.
In kindergarten, I came across the pornographic tapes of my neighbor, so I lost my innocence and purity at 4 years old.
Kassi is so handsome .
My cat is dead because I cut his moustaches.
I broke up with my ex because I was disgusted by him.
I miss home.
I do quite a lot of chicha and I almost kissed Yanis.
Elisa is an unbearable girl.
I eat a bit too much.
I once had a blackout in Spain.
Olivia dates every single guy on campus and wants to make out with Mehdi and Ismael.
I wished the death of a guy that played video games against me. I felt bad after.
Under the influence of a surplus amount of vodka, I may have kissed a very handsome guy and possibly Asahi (my friend) who isn’t my boyfriend.
I love bolognese pasta so much!
In reality , I don’t know what I am doing at this university.
I regret being banned from playing this video game in eighth grade and deleting the game. Snif.
