“It’s precisely by writing from a localized place that you are able to understand anything, even your own self. […] It’s because it’s so different. It’s like when you are in a plane, and because you’re so far from earth, you are able to see the structure. […] It’s because you have some distance. Every single story is localized, anyway. There is no life more universal than another life. To believe so is just an effect of domination.”
“In her sublime essay on the Iliad, written the even darker hour between 1940 and 1941, the French philosopher and mystic, Simone Weil, wrote about the force of war.’ This force, she wrote, is “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns a man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him;” in the Iliad Hector “becomes a thing dragged behind a chariot in the dust.” This isn’t just about the violence of the aggressor. Everyone, victor or vanquished, innocent or guilty, can suddenly find themselves naked with a weapon aimed at them; the force of war is indiscriminate. Thus it is that the epic poem’s narrator refuses to give away which side he’s on. There are few moral certainties in the Iliad; instead, it forces us to confront the possibility of “death locked up in each moment.” Simone Weil knew what she was talking about. She wrote her essay in Marseille whilst waiting for the papers that would get her and her Jewish family out of France, via a refugee camp in Casablanca. Weil would die in exile, three years later in Ashford, Kent.
[…]
Weil speculated that the Iliad was written by exiles from the wars: this is where its wisdom came from. If we wanted to make a really human intervention just now we could do worse than honour the traditions of asylum, and indeed those of the best of human rights law, open up our borders, and invite Syria’s refugees to share their war stories. The tales they might tell would not comfort us about our own humanity—far from it. But they would, perhaps, compel us to confront death—and the obscene horror of this war—more honestly.”
Many places have a “forest that shouldn’t be entered.” Even people who are used to working in the mountains feel there is something there. They are suddenly overcome with fear and it becomes the custom to avoid certain places. These places exist. I don’t know what is there, but I think they are real. I’m not a believer in the occult, but the world is more than we can fathom with our five senses. This world doesn’t exist just for humans. So I think it’s all right to have such things. This is why I think it’s a mistake to think about nature from the idea of efficiency, that forests should be preserved because they are essential for human beings …
I am concerned, because for me the deep forest is connected in some way to the darkness deep in my heart. I feel that if it is erased, then the darkness inside my heart would also disappear, and my existence would grow shallow.
Hayao Miyazaki, “Totoro Was Not Made as a Nostalgia Piece”, Starting Point: 1979-1996 (via perkwunos)
And yet the Americans still aren’t villains; they’re victims. Both sides of the Cold War often depicted the other’s citizenry as victimized, but the Soviet Union elevated it into an art, much in the way that the American mainstream developed the Soviet super-villain into a fetish object. Instead of portraying Americans as eroticized torturers, inhuman strongmen, or sinister ringleaders, the few Soviet movies that do pit Soviet and American characters against each other mostly portray Americans as misled or misinformed.
The Soviet and American mainstreams expressed themselves in radically different ways, with different fears. Being a single party state, the Soviet Union was always factionalist and unsustainable, and could only perpetuate itself through cycles of repression and repudiation. Its anxieties were mostly directed toward itself; as the Americans made fantasies of threat, the USSR made fantasies of stability and global standing. The Soviet Union was also dominated by Russian culture, and inherited its taste for oblique metaphor and indirect address. (It should be noted that the three greatest filmmakers to come out of the Soviet Union—Sergei Eisenstein, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Aleksei German—never completed a film set in the present day.)
Simply put, it wasn’t an environment that was primed to depict the Cold War directly. But it was also an environment with a Cold War mythos that was very different from that of the West. The Soviets did have a “worthy villain,” whom they beat year after year on the big screen: the Nazis. The Soviet Union was the hero who slew the dragon; defeating the Third Reich was a point of national pride. There would never be a more important opponent. The Soviets couldn’t reasonably elevate the Americans to the same status, or even to the status of the White Guard of the bloody Russian Civil War—the USSR’s origin-story villains, in a way.
Seventeen Moments Of Spring—the Soviet Union’s most popular TV miniseries, and a touchstone of Soviet pop culture—was about a Soviet spy in Nazi Germany. Exhaustively long World War II spy stories with way too many characters were surefire successes with Soviet audiences; On Thin Ice, The Shield And The Sword, and Teheran ’43—the top-grossing Soviet films of 1966, 1968, and 1981—all belong to the genre. (Other winning formulas: comedies about bumbling criminals, dramas about pilots, movies in which characters take vacations.) The most popular Soviet action movie, White Sun Of The Desert, is about a Red Army soldier fighting bandits during the Russian Civil War; the successful Elusive Avengers film series (The Elusive Avengers, The New Adventures Of The Elusive Avengers, The Crown Of The Russian Empire) was set during the same era. As far as Soviet pop culture was concerned at the peak of the Cold War, the best enemies were all in the past.
At the same time, Americans couldn’t be expected to kill or die for their cause, because—as the 1965 spy film Game With No Rules, set in Berlin at the start of the Cold War, suggests—they didn’t have a cause to begin with. Instead, the rare American antagonists of popular Soviet film were portrayed as pawns of business interests, military-industrial collusion, or, of course, the Nazis. Portraying a monolithic United States of true believers, focused on the eradication of the USSR, would have gone against two essential aspects of the mythology of Soviet propaganda: the defeat of Nazism, which rid the world of an evil the likes of which it would never see, and the notion of communism as a self-evident ideal.
For decades, Soviet media attacked the United States—with varying degrees of subtlety—as a broken society, its failure obvious. Capitalism and Western democracy weren’t values that could inspire the same kind of commitment as communism, and the only reason anyone would fight for them was because they’d didn’t know better.
It goes further than this though – more didactic Soviet filmmaking explicitly tried to associate capitalists and military leaders collaborating with them with Nazis, while also consistently depicting common Americans as victims. Lev Atamanov’s 1970 animated short Это в наших силах (It’s In Our Power) depicts a general and a businessman gleefully watching as a warbird hatches from an egg that cracks in a perfect swastika. They feed it with money and weapons and it terrorizes common people around the world.
In Vladimir Tarasov’s dark but dreamlike 1979 short Тир (Shooting Range), a down on his luck man in an American city is offered a job at a shooting gallery – nominally as maintenance staff, but as one of the targets if the price is right. It depicts him adjusting to learning to live his everyday life in the line of fire and brings him right up to the point of raising a family in the shooting gallery.
During a chat in January at the Forum Gallery, the Upper East Side space that represents her work, Ms. Monks said she didn’t know if the show would change her life or her sales. But it has given her renewed faith in her work. Before she’d joined up with “The Americans,” she’d felt afraid of the direction she was taking — “darker, more abstract, more emotionally evocative, a little riskier.” Her time on the show, she said, has “given me permission to go deep into it and find that there’s a lot of beauty there.”
I passed this tribute on to the showrunners. “That’s just the sort of backhanded compliment that we here at ‘The Americans’ like to get,” Mr. Fields said. “Here was an artist who was wondering whether or not things were too dark. Then she spent some time with us and realized she could go darker.”
These thematic and emotional concerns are not merely a matter of narrative decisions and character backgrounds. They are etched into the very fabric of the film — its sounds, its visual grammar, its texture. As they venture deeper into this alien terrain, this becomes more evident. The plants they encounter are strangely drained of color, as is the unnerving shark-alligator hybrid. Concrete walls are covered in vegetation that reads as cancerous growth, tumors awash in psychedelic color. From certain angles, trees scan as humanoid in shape. Depression is like this. It consumes everything in its path, warping it madly. The world is drained of vibrancy or easy understanding. The finest meal can taste like ash. Your body is no longer your own, but a weapon formed against you.
How Annihilation Nails the Complex Reality of Depression (source)
countervisuality 