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Nothing Symmetrical

2011-05-19T07:54:00.003-04:00

I did not know Sally Mann, or of fame she made out of those photos of her children naked. I saw her bio documentary last weekend entirely unimpressed. Her works of kids appeared to be just mediocre or even pretentious photographs of house wife photographer taken out of the context. So I found it such an irony that the whole phenomena came/blown out of proportion and treated as some sort of artistic sensationalism. To my standard, they were not even the level of sensationalism. They were simply boring works in black and white. Sorry, but there is some truth in this take of mine on Mann's photographs.

Apparently I am influenced by Nakadate's body of works of ten years, I admit that Mann also gave me some food for thoughts in the light of what it means to take/see photos shot by female photographers.

Those works of Nakadate's are replete with wary tension and attention for exploitative moments, but since she seemed completely strategic of this obvious and recurrent theme, I found them less intriguing than I had imagined they would be. What still unusually fascinates me is her tireless pursuit of brutal encounters between human body vs. nature. To put it more precise, how vulnerable human bodies could be in the vast nature. She repeatedly tried to set out for the quest in the quasi cow-boy style as if half to re-imagine the days of west forward exploration and the rest to deny the structure of the idea of west as the destination of progress.

But the most visceral moment was her exposing the asymmetrical relationship with female and male body: now you know what she really wanted to achieve by picking up those famously ugly men and made them appear in her video works. No plausibly attractive men were observed in the series of her works. Or in her works, at all. On the contrary, all the men were borderline creeps to the extent that it was not easy to look at them. Those are monstrously ugly men. One possible hyperthesis to explain Nakadate's intention to employ those is to expose how asymmetrical men and women are even in each side's intention. Let alone their physical appearances. Men are this ugly and still believe that they are in a romantic moment as long as they are sitting with women. That is the historical and collective narrative of men and women. Men have possibly believed that it is love when a women is around and they are attracted to the woman. Nakadate completely destroyed their self-serving belief and imposition of themselves on women. To do so, Nakadate simply showed how ugly those men are. Men still believe there is something symmetrical because they are men and women whereas there is nothing symmetrical between them and Nakadate.

2011-05-10T18:07:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I finally made it at this show of Nakadate, the photographer that I had discussed, if in brief, in the previous entry. I am still living the very odd and raw state, and it is still difficult to put any writing out on the internet. Yet this is the topic that I should not omit, so here it is to commemorate.

Things We Shouldn't Do

2011-02-28T08:57:00.008-05:00

This blog's theme is, in case you did not recognize, mental ~~illness~~ health.

I spent the weekend thinking on Laurel Nakadate and her works. Originally it started from an interview my friend sent me through an email. This interview was dazzling, struck me so close to home and then, made me question strongly about several different things such as my work ethics. Nobody told me to work--as a hooker-- but I have worked, and nobody told me not to write, but I would often stopped writing as if there was any reason to stop it. As if that was the only way to think. Or it may really be is the only way to think; write and stop. And think with a long interval.

I would discuss more on the artist Nakadate later but one thing in brief for now; she is talking about how to look in the interview and she sees bravery in the act. I never thought of 'seeing' that way. To think about how people look is ultimately meaningful especially in the current context--post literary world where people communicate more in images than in languages--but I more attached some other meanings to the act. To me, seeing is an alternative to taking action. But reading her ideas about the act of seeing indeed makes me rethink the same old definition of 'what it means to see' to me.

I believe her ultimate tool of art making is her camera to establish point of her view as well as her boundary, her own identity and subjectivity. In another words, camera is her alibi that provides all of those that I raised that essentially establishes one's identity. I have been wondering about the same thing regarding my case. To me, writing is the tool of establishing my point of view in the world and how to set the boundary. In other words, how to restore myself from the ultimately extreme situation of danger, which is out there once you go work every night. And ultimately I have been pushing the limit and the goal of my project has shifted, or been blurred and now become something else. Or something I can't really place now. I have been trying to figure out disoriented.

body, highjacked

2011-01-17T01:00:00.022-05:00

Though I was planning to sort all the writings on movies in one site and entitle it something like 'movies nobody watched' etc. I chose to post this entry here for the movie today is also about an Albanian (Kosovo Albanian) woman in the 'first world' and how her life took an unretreatable turn due to migration. Since this blog has the history of its dedication to Albanian studies--exaggeration but I held those posts back when I deserted here a while ago-- this article might fit here. Maybe I will organize and put those posts out again eventually.

'Lorna's Silence' 2008 by Dardenne brothers

The title today was one of a few movies that I saw recently: it has been hard for me to see movies through. So it was really an uncommon experience to begin with. The movie was shocking just a bit more than any other titles the Dardennes had made before. The effect that the movie caused me was so raw that I felt that I needed to write something about it in order to get over with it.

The movie was about a young woman Lorna from Kosovo currently living in Belgium, married to a local man to acquire citizenship of the country (or of Eu). This marriage was treated as a clandestine contract--she was a part of a crime ring that organized sham marriage to generate citizenship for people who'd pay, and Lorna was getting the reward--she would get her citizenship for herself and her boy friend, also from Kosovo-- and the money she would get if she fulfilled the part in the immigration scheme. There was no personal decision or preference involved in her marriage with Claudy, the man who married her for money, too. Every process and decision were arranged by the ring manager called Fabio--who originally brought Lorna to the country and controlled the complicated scam operation-- in their marriage where was prioritized efficiency. Even Lorna's next client for another marriage was lined up--a Russian mob who was prepared to pay to get married for citizenship, and there was no time to be wasted. Now that she had acquired her own citizenship, they were looking for the right timing to get rid of her husband. The plan had been laid out from the beginning, and he was to killed by a fake overdose case; Claudy was a heroine addict, and that was the exact reason he was picked for the role. He had to be finished off and it would kill two birds by one quick stone; they could even save the money they would have to pay when she would divorce him, if he were alive by then.

Claudy spent most of the time in their marriage as an addict with occasional attempts to quit, unsuccessfully. This time, he tried to quit again cold turkey, being admitted to the emergency ward, and the sudden urge to save him from this predicament caught Lorna. Seeking out a way to secure him before Fabio and his assistant would execute the plan, she decided that she would get a divorce instead and tried to make sure Claudy would overcome his addiction.

If you are curious of the aftermath, I suggest you just watch the film. I will spill it anyway and it won't undermine the dramatic effect; the real point of the film is not in the plot. Yet, or all the more, I want you to watch and experience it by yourself regardless what I say here.

Simply put, Lorna ended up having sex with him over the culminated tension between two of them in the closed off environment. Nonetheless Cloudy was killed by the manipulated overdose after getting cleaned in rehab. To the crime ring, it would not make much difference whether someone like Claudy was let go by a divorce or murder. He was a nameless and helpless junky whom nobody cared dead or alive. It could not get easier for those who schemed it, for the scenario just fit anywhere in the pattern of a typical drug addict's getting off and on, the eternal circle. Just to save the money and time--that was all the worth the ring saw in Claudy's life--he was gotten rid of. Nobody even noticed except Lorna. What followed to it was just predictable: the ring no longer needed someone as Lorna, either, who knew too much.

Even after seeing the movie, I had to live the lingering afterthought for a while. During the uneasy process, some thought occurred and alarmed me; I was somehow seeing and thinking Lorna as a prostitute. And realized that she was not. Her body was placed in the transaction the whole time not exactly for sex per se but after all, the way she was deprived of her life was worse than how a prostitute in an extreme condition could be deprived of her own body. In the circumstance, there seems very little point to argue Lorna's own participation --or her lack of agency--in the operation. Even if she could have opted out the ruthless and crude world of crime, the range of choices she could make would not be the same as what a local woman could have. So the argument should shift from an individual exercise of moral decisions--or something like free-will-- if you want to understand the human condition the movie tried to capture and examine.

I could not see the film without feeling for the cruelty the movie portrayed, and the reason why. The cruel world Lorna was locked in looked just familiar: I also live there so the landscape was something as home to me. All seemed so familiar to me I had to study the repulsion the movie represented as if I finally had enough distance to notice that it was there: I also got married to a man whose life revolved around drugs, and the circle somehow seemed locked. Though it was a long time ago, I'm still in the process of the divorce being almost finalized, and not exactly yet. I'm afraid it will be two years by the time when it will be really finalized since it was initially filed. I did not get married for paper/residency or money. But I did not get married for love, either.

The movie is lucid about the people's predicament but ultimately the real horror of not being able to live their own bodies, therefore alienated from their own lives. That was what made me groan. Claudy, the husband's, portrayal of addiction brought the movie in life.This actor Jérémie Renier represents somehow the Dardennes' continuing bleak realism repeatedly if in different roles and sets over the course of time: he was Igor in the Promise--the kid who was pledged to the underworld apprenticeship, and the father who sold his new born baby to the child sale ring in the Child.

Lorna was, however, the most deprived of one's own body, therefore, the most tragic figure in the whole movie. And the camera was staring the condition without any distraction, flinching or sentimentalism. What the camera presented was the visceral reality of her life being highjacked simply because she was a woman from an impoverished region in Europe and therefore easily targeted for the systematic exploitation. She was there not because she was morally inferior--unlike West European 'first' world callously regards the condition--but because she was beyond the world where people believe in choices and ethical values associated with the choices people make. I would not say there was no free-will. On the contrary, there was the decision she dared to make at her own risk, and the weight of the choice and the condition she had to live optionless were the moral question the Dardennes set in the film; why some people live this way whereas other people even in the same neighborhood live in different way?

Just as the area (Balkan/Albania) has developed the thriving market for human trafficking and its common tactics of distribution system for the entire Euro, the phenomena attract media attention for their voyeuristic and condescending representations. Yet they are only corresponding to what people are going though in the region in last two decades. As I wrote here in the old entries, even people I know from the area --Albanians--actually swam across the ocean and got arrested in Greece, or Italy, and applied for political asylum, became slaves and sold and re-sold and entirely violated before they came to the US as free men finally. I am not talking about 19th century; it is only in last two decades in Europe. It has been a while since Greek movie industry is mostly occupied by this kind of subjects of Albanian struggle for survival in the better off countries that are only neighbors.