Tristram Shandy (A Cock and Bull Story 2005)

A Cock and Bull Story is a 2005 British comedy film directed by Michael Winterbottom. It is a film-within-a-film, featuring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon playing themselves as egotistical actors during the making of a screen adaptation of Laurence Sterne's 18th-century metafictional novel Tristram Shandy. Gillian Anderson and Keeley Hawes also play themselves in addition to their Tristram Shandy roles. Since the book is about a man attempting but failing to write his autobiography, the film takes the form of being about failing to make the film.

An Illegal Rave (a dance drama)

 

The film consists of a live DJ (Jätten - The Giant https://www.facebook.com/musikfantast) who plays at a illegal rave party where a dark, but also funny, story takes place. In the crowd, a group of actors move around and interact with the party participants. Most people are unaware that the person they are talking to has a microphone and is a character in the movie. So much of what you hear and see is improvised. The cohesive thing is that everyone pretends to be at an underground rave for criminals. A bit like the Boiler Room.

The story is about Sandra who has robbed a jeweler's shop and will flee the country with the loot. Her plan is to find someone with a boat that she can pay for. She tries her luck at an illegal rave, which goes as it goes.

Directed by Samuel Olsson

Producer: Quinn Cordukes

Sound: Niclas Carlén

Production by: JAQ Studios

English and Swedish subtitles available! (click on Settings at the bottom of the video and select language)

John Berger and Susan Sontag / To Tell A Story (1983)

The power of stories, as modes of representation, as ways to understand ourselves and that which we experience as reality, including other people, is discussed in this highly engaging meeting between John Berger and Susan Sontag. Both of these thinkers and writers are now sadly no longer with us on this plain of reality. John Berger died two days ago, and Susan Sontag died in 2004. This discussion between them inspired so many thoughts in me, having found it on the wonderful Open Culture blog, I uploaded it here. Just so I know where it is if I ever need it...and I probably will from time to time.

One thing that struck me personally from this conversation is that the first stories I remember were told to me orally, about members of my family that I never met. Soldiers, farmers and explorers. It then occurred to me that my mother came from an oral storytelling culture - she did not go to school until she was 13, her mother did not go to school at all. They lived on a huge cattle property in central Queensland in Australia that had been in the family for over 100 years. My father on the other hand grew up in nearest big town, (5 hours drive on the sealed roads that had been created by the time I was a child, when they were kids it took a lot longer), which was becoming a city as he came of age. He lived in books and our house was literally a library. I once packed up my father's library to move him, and it came in at 300 banana boxes. That is a lot of books. But my maternal grandmother told me the stories of the bush, and the world that she remembered from the 1920s as a child.

Photograph taken the year before my maternal grandmother was born (1911) in Taroom, the nearest settlement to where she grew up. It was an oral storytelling culture, even when she was a young adult, although they read and wrote, the spoken story was the more common vehicle.

The Obama Deception

Yesterday a good friend told me about a film he saw on the net that made an impression on him. It is called The Obama Deception and it deal with:

The Obama phenomenon is a hoax carefully crafted by the captains of the New World Order. He is being pushed as savior in an attempt to con the American people into accepting global slavery.

Last night I watched some of it with this blog post in mind and a critical eye at the ready. My thoughts congealed around the idea that power for 99% of the population is as distant as the moon. Conspiracy (and I will explain what I mean by that) is one way of bringing the conception of power closer to the mundaneness of daily life. To explain how I came to this idea I go back to the Goombungee school bus in the hot summer of 1983. The Australian government had just changed and after 8 years of centre-right leadership the adults who could had just voted in a Labour government led by Robert (Bob) Hawke, then holder of the beer sculling world record, a yard glass - approximately 3 imperial pints or 1.7 litres - in eleven seconds.

On my school bus sat several teenagers from religious families. I remember one of these kids speaking at length about Hawke "being pushed as savior in an attempt to con the American Australian people into accepting global slavery" involving a world bank and Zionist plots. There was even a prophecy from Nostradamus involved in his explanation (something about "a man with the name of a wild bird in a land yet undiscovered coming to power"). We on the Goombungee bus looked out over the eucalyptus scrub and dry fields and felt somehow involved in the functions of power by being privy to this 'truth'. The machinery of power may have been impossibly distant from us there in that hot tin box on wheels, but we understood something that perhaps others did not. There was a conspiracy at work and we had come into contact with it through narrative.

Later in my life, in 1994 I attended a lecture at Sydney University by Noam Chomsky (who no doubt is part of the same conspiracy as Bob Hawke but we on the Goombungee bus did not get much exposure to anarchist linguists so he was never in the story). I remember Chomsky touched on the idea of conspiracy theories in his presentation. He said that conspiracy theories are dependent on distance; if it is an enemy state it is not a conspiracy, it is intelligence (think Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, the famine that has been going on in North Korea for a decade and so on). If the theory under consideration is closer to 'home' and involves one's own government then we are talking conspiracy.

In the decade and a half since I saw Chomsky speak, power has drifted even further away from the masses in many lands. With jobs moving to the new industrial economies of the East and governments moving upwards into a level of global blocs (NAFTA, EU, ASEAN and so on) the average citizen can be forgiven for feeling there is more to the story of government than what they are being told. The concept of politic agency at the individual level is not strong and healthy at the moment in many nations. It is here that the conspiracy enters into the fabric of political narrative. Conspiracy, such as The Obama Deception brings power closer to people via narrative and thereby provides a sense of mythic agency in relation to politics.

The tragedy of media such as The Obama Deception is not the possible degrees of truth value that can be related to it as a text. Rather, that political agency is translated into complex narratives and enacted out along reactionary lines of behaviour as a part of the political process (it has had 2.5 million views on just one of its YouTube sites) I find very disturbing. The more time people spend putting together the pieces of The Obama Deception puzzle (even if it is just in their minds) the less time is being spent on actually doing something to participate in the democratic political process. Of course the people behind The Obama Deception would say that there is no democratic process today. That's the way they want it. The result of such a narrative as The Obama Deception and "the man with the name of a wild bird" from 1983 is a negation of what few democratic rights we have remaining.

A History of the Future of Narrative: Robert Coover

A History of the Future of Narrative: Robert Coover from Scott Rettberg on Vimeo.

Novelist Robert Coover's keynote address at the Electronic Literature in Europe seminar (elitineurope.net), September 13th, 2008. Introduced by Scott Rettberg. Videography by Martin Arvebro.