Douglas Fairbanks (center) & director Allan Dwan (right) on the set of Robin Hood (1922). Giant megaphones were used to direct large crowds of extras.
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"Capitalism has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. Capitalism has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. [But] capitalism cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the means of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the capitalist epoch from all earlier ones. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed."
—
John Lanchester quoting Karl Marx (but substituting the word capitalism for the bourgeoisie) in his excellent essay on “Marx at 193,” which I came to via Irredenta. I’m familiar with Marx’s errors, particularly his anthropologically- and morally-confused prescriptions and his overestimation of dialectics as an “objective” mechanism in historical development, but this essay recalls his talents as a diagnostician.
In particular, capitalism’s “constant revolutionizing” is why capitalist culture invariably becomes youth culture, and it is why youth is ever-more-respected as a summary font of natural, progressive, authentic wisdom, despite being by definition the most experientially (and often culturally and intellectually) ignorant part of the population. Given the power culture has to shape political discourse, it’s only a slight exaggeration to say, then, that capitalism brings about kakistocracy, even as it does indeed show the power humanity has to shape itself and the world.
In a revolution, the young are of course those with the least to lose. In our constant revolutions it is therefore natural that the young should become the reliable agents of fury, upheaval, change: this is emphatically not because such change necessarily benefits the young or anyone else; after all, youth tend to be sufficiently ignorant of history and indifferent to their own moral incoherence that one cannot seriously claim that their enthusiasm for change is based on anything like analysis. Rather, the phenomenon of maturing alongside revolutions infuses youth with a sense of their own global, ideological, moral importance. For them, “change” is the fruition of their sole, and probably initial paradigm, while for older individuals revolutions are the disturbance of mostly-uninterrogated paradigms according to whose values their entire life’s meaning has been determined.
Thus: capitalism raises each generation alongside a revolution in “the instruments of production, and thereby the means of production, and with them the whole relations of society.” Each generation comes of age with technologies, media, industries which radically alter the nature of social existence, the structure of cities, the dynamics of relationships, the meanings and values which ostensibly sustain and guide us but which now seem merely to tag along. And quite understandably, each generation thinks that this new paradigm —their paradigm, after all, which they absorb easily and even think they shape— is the last paradigm, or at least that it is largely faultless even if it will be superseded. In its turn, each generation comes to think, too, that its reconnection with lingering traditions is enough to preserve them, that its necessitated reinvention of all culture will endure. The evangelical zeal of youth, whether expressed politically or aesthetically, derives in part from the seemingly historic nature of any given teenager’s maturation: not only is the great bulk of cultural and market activity directed at the young, but they occupy a position of magical moral inevitability: a young person might not be allowed to wear what she wants at the office, but does anyone doubt that the world will be remade in her image, and not that of the dreary old morons from previous generations, already dying on the vine?
Capitalism seems therefore to promote a narcissistic infantility of disposition which itself produces more constant revolutions, especially once enshrined in a national “rebellion” myth instantiated in countless films, books, songs. We produce children who coincide in their growth with the fruition of revolutionary technological and economic phenomena; we inculcate them with stories of revolutionaries and rebels, indeed suggesting that to be young is to rebel, whether or not there is any real, enduring purpose, whether or not the values of one’s forebears are “right” or not (such determinations are incoherently considered invalid, epistemologically, even as they form the basis for all continuing moral action). In other words, capitalism raises revolutionaries: children contemptuous of the past in all aesthetic, moral, and political senses who automatically rebel against everything passed down, and who feel that their arrival is the culmination of a history from which they can learn only trivia, not meanings and values which, having been vetted for millennia experientially by humans no different from them, can direct them in their own lives. In doing so, capitalism increases the likelihood that additional revolutions will occur: every atomized revolutionary inventing culture from scratch has a chance at building the next billion-dollar-gadget, the next attention-sucking media platform, the next block-busting franchise of food or films.
Of course, one errs if one denies that she might also develop any number of manifestly necessary, vital, life-saving and life-improving ideas; even Marx could not deny that it was, after all, this system which has at last shown “what man’s activity can bring about.” It is only a matter of considering the basis of our youth culture: it is not any axiom or principle we’ve discerned through the millennia, nor any scientific theory which supports the infantilization of culture and the empowerment of youth. It is capitalism’s constant revolutions which empower the young, separate them from their forbears, given them their unearned sense of historical apotheosis, and relegate tradition- or elder-based phenomena like “wisdom” to the margins of culture.
(via mills)
(via mills)
“What the studios want now is “risk-free” films but with any sort of art you have to take risks. Not taking risks in art is like not having sex and then expecting there to be children.” Francis Ford Coppola
(via fuckyeahdirectors)
The Sun with Spots Big Enough to Swallow the Earth by Janet Malcolm (2011). Paper collage, 10 x 8 inches. Malcolm:
Last winter, I came into possession of the papers of an émigré psychiatrist who practiced in New York in the late 1940s and 1950s. The archive included a collection of manila envelopes, around six by ten inches, stuffed with folded sheets of thin paper covered with single-spaced typing: the notes the psychiatrist made after seeing patients (many of them fellow émigrés) in his office. As I studied the sheets with their inky typewriting and 60-year-old paper clips holding them together and leaving rust marks on the surface, my collagist’s imagination began to stir. I began to “see” some version of the collages on view here. The scraps of paper I collect are largely black and white (preferably yellowing white) and have an archaic and melancholy air about them. They hark back to the 19th century and its technological and scientific vernacular. The case studies, with their sad old appearance, were of a piece with this backward-looking aesthetic. Further, in their sometimes almost parodic Freudian interpretations, they summoned a period in psychiatry that is as remote from today’s practice as the manual typewriter is from the Macintosh computer. These collages arose—I’m not sure how—from this encounter with the past.
More at the NYRB.
Poster Art: Georgii & Vladimir Stenberg/Soviet Russia edition (click on individual posters for hi-res/film info).
“Our primary device is [photo]montage…[but] we do not neglect Construction. Ours are eye-catching posters which, one might say, are designed to shock. We deal with the material in a free manner… disregarding actual proportions…turning figures upside-down; in short, we employ everything that can make a busy passerby stop in their tracks.”
-Vladimir Stenberg (1928)
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"I think that the romantic impulse is in all of us and that sometimes we live it for a short time, but it’s not part of a sensible way of living. It’s a heroic path and it generally ends dangerously. I treasure it in the sense that I believe it’s a path of great courage. It can also be the path of the foolhardy and the compulsive."
— Director Jane Campion (via pas-de-chat)
(via fuckyeahdirectors)
"I never fall in love with anything. I really don’t, I am not joking. ‘Do the best you can, try to live it down,’ that’s my motto. Just literally give it everything you got, and then know that it’s never going to turn out the way you want it to, and let it go, and hope that it doesn’t return. Because you want it to be better than it can ever turn out. Absolutely, 1000 percent, I believe this: Whenever a director friend of mine says, ‘Man, the dailies look amazing!’… I actually believe that anybody, who thinks that their dailies look amazing doesn’t understand the power of cinema; doesn’t understand what cinema is capable of."
— David Fincher (via neuromanticism)
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Anthony Perkins in The Trial (1962, dir. Orson Welles) (via)
Poster art: Saul Bass edition
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