Hito Steyerl - November

Hito Steyerl, November (2004)

Amongst many other things, Hito Steyerl's film November (2004) provides – within the realm of contemporary art practice – a startling reflection on some of the themes that I have been starting to explore on this blog.

The film traces the enigmatic figure of Andrea Wolf through a series of circulating media representations. Wolf - the film tells us - was a teenage friend of Steyerl, and the star of Steyerl's first movie, a home-made teenage feminist appropriation of martial art and exploitation tropes, shot on super-8 back in the 1970s. Only the action scenes were ever made, and the film involves a group of girls seeking out and beating up men for reasons that no longer seem clear to Steyerl herself, reprising imagery from Russ Mayer's Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill!, a film that Steyerl notes is "tacky," and which is ideologically dubious to say the least, but which nonetheless seems here to have provided a model of identification within which feminist (or at least proto-feminist) desires could be negotiated by the young, somewhat radical, women who took part in Steyerl's shoot.

A still from Steyerl's early movie, reproduced in November shows Andrea Wolf,  age of 18. 

Wolf, however, also went on to lead a life involved in rather more actual radical politics, becoming involved in far-left groups in the orbit of the Red Army Faction, and ending her days in Turkey as a guerrilla with the Kurdish PKK. It was there that she met a tragic death, executed by the Turkish authorities. The fantasy violence of teenage identifications with media images are transformed into the messy real life violence of war. Wolf, however, was turned once again into a media image, in the guise of a political martyr, and made to circulate once more in the realm of imaginary identifications and kitsch fantasies.

Kurdish propaganda poster celebrating Andrea Wolf (with her assumed Kurdish name of Sehit Ronahi) after her death as a revolutionary martyr. These images were used on marches by PKK-sympathetic groups. 

Within her exploration of the power of images – in their continual circulation and with their continual transformations of meaning, to feed into reality, producing myths that are then performed – Steyerl's film includes a meditation on the martial arts cinema with which she and Andrea Wolf alike were obviously so fascinated as youths – Steyerl making a home-made B-Movie homage to the genre as her first directorial experiment, and Wolf taking up karate as a part of her self-creation as a militant, as an act, if you like, of self-empowerment. In November, Steyerl also recounts the myth of Bodhidharma travelling from India to China and founding the Shaolin Temple, creating the archetype of the lone, wandering warrior, dedicated to truth and justice and fighting the strong and the tyrranical with bare hands alone. It was a myth spread globally by the martial arts movies that boomed in the seventies, even finding its way into avant-garde texts such as René Viénet's Situationist classic Can Dialectics Break Bricks? – a film I've started to discuss elsewhere on this blog, and which Steyerl quotes at a number of points in her own twenty-first century revisitation of the "kung fu" moment.

Still from Steyerl's early film, as reproduced in November.

Of course, as much contemporary scholarship has set out to show, the story of Bodhidharma and the story of a Shaolin rebellion is so much myth, constructed largely only in the twentieth century, under the radical modernising programmes of the Nationalists and Communists, which sought to co-opt the physical cultures of martial arts into a nationalist revival of the body politic. Much of the discourse around the martial arts (and out of which martial arts cinema emerges) seems to hinge on the obsessive and contrary acts of making and unmasking myth. It has recently become something of an industry to debunk the Chinese martial arts' claims to older and more subversive histories, with writers in particular such as Peter Lorge and Stanley Henning in the forefront.

But this, for me, is where Steyerl's complex negotiation of the territory trumps the demythologisers. Her film at once criticises and lays bare the treachery of images and myths, their mutability, their seductive but dangerous power, and their ability to never quite mean what you want them to mean, even in your own acts of appropriation; but it also seems to embrace the productive power of myth, and of popular culture as a site of its circulation. Myth is the very power (the puissance, as Lacoue-Labarthe put it)[1] to produce a self and a position in the world, however compromised such a position may become by the instability of representation, and the powers that already colonise the image. The grasping and active, critical renegotiation of myth, rather than its simple rejection, becomes an important emancipatory activity.

In marking this complexity and ambivalence, Steyerl manages to avoid the trap into which the martial arts mythbusters fall. Such mythbusters fail to grasp the mythological power of their own acts of demythologisation. Thus when the Jingwu academy, back in the early twentieth century, broke the image of the Shaolin Temple as the fount of martial arts (a myth at that point not actually that old), it was only to replace it with the myth of the patriotic Huo Juanjia and his death at the hands of Japanese oppressors. And similarly it seems hardly co-incidental that at the moment when there is a rage for Western Scholars such as Lorge and Henning who (to put it a little crudely and to exaggerate just a little) deracinate the cultural aspects of Chinese martial arts in order to turn them into objects of comparative study, this is actually also the moment of the rise of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), perhaps one of the most reactionary forms of martial artistry since the kung fu craze, in its gender politics as well as its spectacularisation of violence as pay-per-view spectacle, and one that also pretends to a "scientific" and trans-cultural neutrality in order to assert its suppose superiority over backwards forms of ("foreign") traditional practice. Such a scientism is in its own way an ultimate form of magical and mythologising gesture, set now under capitalist imperatives for making money.

(Some interesting analysis of the mythical nature of MMA and the like has recently been given in the "Martial Arts Studies" edition of JOMEC, to which I also contributed – see in particular Paul Bowman's reflection on "realism" in contemporary martial arts, and Daniele Bolelli's analysis of the role of "Gladiator" movies in the forming the nature of the visual spectacle of MMA. But I digress...)

Steyerl's film is called November. Within the film, the title is explained through the contrast to the revolutionary moment of October, a moment where things appear simple and true, and revolutionary action can be grasped confidently. By November, things are looking much more tangled and messy, the revolutionary enthusiasm shown as always already compromised by – and fallen into – the false images on which it depended. Steyerl doesn't retreat from problematising a radical legacy in her self-construction as a critical leftist, noting the ways in which in real history the "good guys" (even Andrea Wolf) are often not nearly as innocent or lilly-white as their mediatised images. November is a time of distrust and scepticism. It's a time when identifications need to be rebuilt, but also when they need to be guarded against.

It seems to me that martial arts cinema as a global phenomenon was always a cinema of "November" - a cinema of the aftermath – springing up in the wake of the global wave of decolonisation and the protests of "1968." It was always a cinema where the real had passed into its simulations and its uncanny (and untrustworthy) imagistic doubles. The question might remain, however, of the "truth" that such images nonetheless might carry into the present.

November, then is a time of haunting. A time, as Derrida might suggest, quoting Hamlet "out of joint." (See his Spectres of Marx.) Steyerl seems to capture this haunted and haunting quality of media images very well, neither there nor not-there. To live in the realm of media images is to live a haunted existence.

Perhaps this is the point, more generally, with the martial arts film, too. Even if the myths they recount don't simply tie us to a simple continuity with the past, in the way that official Chinese Communist Party histories sought to imagine the Boxers Rebellion, the Taiping Rebellion, the uprisings of the Hongmen (Tiandihui), or further back peasant revolts such as that of Li Zicheng, in their own image, there seems to me to remain the question of what it is that returns in them, what haunts them, from elsewhere, as it were.

Steyerl's film can be seen here:
http://vimeo.com/88484604

Note
[1] According to Lacoue-labarthe, myth "is a 'power' [puissance], the power that is in the gathering together of the fundamental forces and orientations of an individual or a people, that is to say the power of deep, concrete, embodied identity." See his Heidegger, Art and Politics, p.93.

Resistance

"Resistance is on its way to becoming a word of power, emerging alongside the terms 'revolution' and 'reform' that Hegel saw defining the range of modern politics."
Howard Caygill, "Also Sprach Zapata," Radical Philosophy 171 (Jan/Feb 2011):19.

In this sense, resistance is a third term that seems to problematise some of the binary oppositions characterised in earlier posts here (1 May 2011, 29 May 2011). What does 'resistance' do as a term in a project like mine? Does it serve as a term which opens us a productive thinking both of contemporary political practices, and the kinds of popular cultural resources that might include the kung fu film, and which might be considered, in this context, as resources for resistance? Does 'resistance' serve to elucidate a value for these? Or does it serve to mark their limit?

Most of Caygill's article explores Clausewitz (a rather occidental alternative to Sun Tzu et al!). He explores the way that a certain reading of Clausewitz allows us to think him as a philosopher of "the people's war of resistance" (22). Caygill notes that Clausewitz was setting out in his military theory to understand Napoleon's success, and also to understand how Napoleon could be fought – including the emergence of the guerrilla.

"To account for this change in the character of warfare, Clausewitz proposed a redefinition of war. In section 2 of book 1 of, 'Definition,' he defines the end or Zweck of war as to 'render the enemy incapable of further resistance.' So resistance is absolutely central to war – war addresses the enemy's capacity to resist." (22)

Such a foregrounding of "resistance" seems to speak to the kinds of narratives offered in kung fu films. Though the heroes – members of secret societies, loyalists of defeated dynasties, anti-tyrannical monks – are sometimes referred to in the subtitles or dubs as "revolutionaries," that term is perhaps a little misleading. They usually don't have a clear revolutionary agenda, certainly at least in the terms in which Thomas Taylor Meadows set up the term (i.e. in opposition to mere rebellion).

The plots, furthermore, rarely celebrate victorious uprising, the expulsion of the oppressor. What the heroes of the films succeed in, rather than dealing a final blow to their enemies, is precisely becoming heroes; they often die to do so; but their victory can be understood in the way that their inspirational example, even in personal defeat, keeps alive a larger possibility of resistance. The films are set in the darkest hours of defeat and occupation: either in the deepest depths of Qing rule, or, perhaps (as in the case of a film such as Lau Kar-Leung's Eight-Diagram Pole Fighter), at the moment of the slow defeat of the Song state by the Mongolians back in the thirteenth century. Chinese history is seen, in these tales, as a long struggle, and the films express a hope that if the spirit of resistance and the corporeal capacity to fight (as preserved in the martial arts) remain alive, then the war will not be over and the enemy will not be victorious. It is a vision, of course, that is sustained in a vision of the vast sweep of Chinese history, which has been marked not only between recurrent and lengthy "barbarian" occupation, but also each time by the final reversion to Han rule.

Such narratives, and such an account of the essential nature of resistance, might also offer an alternative template through which to valorise or to speculate on the longue durée (Braudel again!) of popular struggle, and the forms of "resistance" of peasants and the like – whether conceived in terms of medieval European uprisings and practices of cussed daily non-cooperation, Hobsbawm's "social banditry," or the sort of Qing-era protest described in Hung Ho-Fung's Protest with Chinese Characteristics (see image of salt riot recently posted!). Such, once again, are hardly "revolutionary" – and are often dismissed for their failure to be such – but nonetheless they perhaps remain essential in terms of keeping alive an "other" culture in the face of the official discourses of power.

In this regard, another of Caygill's remarks, drawing on the implications of applying a Clausewitzian notion of "resistance" to peoples' struggles against the State, is also very descriptive of the kung-fu scenario, and the "longue durée" of poular stuggle alike:

This ... involves the temporality of resistance. The strategy of the weaker – whether [Maoist] guerrilla or [Ghandian] satyagraha – is a strategy of time; the preservation of the capacity to resist involves a refusal to enter the augmenting cycle of violence that is escalation. This refusal means declining the invitation of the state to escalate violence in its pursuit of what Clausewitz called the 'decisive blow' and instead to threaten the State's capacity to resist by temporal distension, by what Mao in 1937 theorized as the 'prolonged war of resistance'. The war of resistance is above all a war for time – with one enemy proposing escalation and the concentration of struggle in a moment, the other responding by prolonging resistance indefinitely" (23-4).

Caygill's essay ends with a rather upbeat account of such resistance, looking in particular at the reminiscences of members of the early stages of the French Resistance movement against the second world war, who found a special aliveness in acts of resistance, and at the sayings of Subcommmandante Marcos of the more recent Zapatista movement, where resistance – as the preservation of resistance – again becomes a kind of an end and a joy in itself. (As in many ways a martial art is – certainly as depicted in martial arts cinema – in the creation and reproduction of the body's autonomy and power.)

However, is this the point where we have to ask questions about Caygill's argument – and perhaps about the politics of the narratives of martial arts films? Is it enough to be able to continue to resist, in the face of a more powerful enemy? Is this an end in itself? Is it enough to think that whilst we still resist an order we despise this keeps alive the possibility that one day, ground down by the slow pressures of non-conformity, or overcome by some external threat, current arrays of power will die away? Does such a conception of resistance in some ways end up complicit with the power one resists, allowing its continuation? In the end is "resistance" necessary (and important to nurture in a way that some revolutionary or reformist movements run the danger of forgetting) but nonetheless not sufficient?

A last question might rotate around the relationship of Caygill's article to its (and our own) historical context. Such an argument for the importance of "resistance" (rather than revolution) seems profoundly conditioned by a certain pessimism with regard to the kinds of possibility for change alive in the present. What does it say of our times to find "resistance" as the most we can hope for?

There are two ways in which this seeming pessimism might be valenced. The first is to judge it negatively: to find in it a failure of the "optimism of the will" and of the utopian imagination necessary to produce a better world. The second would be to recognise that at moments in history where the progressive or radical left is an "afflicted power" somewhat on the fringe of a field of politics (of "war continued by other means") dominated by the capitalist right, then a tactics of resistance – building its networks and its cultures – is highly appropriate, with more directly "revolutionary" strategies basically non-viable. Today's situation may be such a moment; and so, too, might be the context of the growth of the kung-fu genre in the early 70s in Hong Kong, in the wake of the clampdown on labour, radical and democratic groups at the end of the 1960s. Perhaps in some ways, this commonality is why I believe that the political imaginary of the kung-fu genre resonates so strongly with the present.

Lua Kar-Leung and the Radical Aesthetics of the Kung-fu Body

I have been working on a paper that I am giving in New York next month. (The conference is “Radical Aesthetics and Politics: Intersections in Music, Art and Critical Social Theory,”9 December 2011 at Hunter College, CUNY - see http://chreculture.blogspot.com/)

In this I am setting out to discuss a potential radicality in the performing kung-fu body, and I attempt to make this argument in particular with reference to Lau Kar-Leung. My argument draws on ideas in Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller" that highlight the importance of an "auratic" relation to the past in allowing us to imagine the world differently. Benjamin's essay also highlights the value of artisanal modes of experience and practice, with which I associate martial arts practices and its performing bodies.

For me, there are larger stakes in the essay, which are to do with the ways in which popular culture more generally may serve as a medium of a counter-memory or counter-practice.

Below is a link to an early draft – rather longer than the 15-minute paper I'll give. Please forgive its roughness: it's presented here as a work in progress. As such, any comments on it would be very welcome!

To read the draft click here.

Work in Kung Fu Films 1 (Or: Wax on, Wax off!)

Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita waxing lyrical in John G Avildsen's The Karate Kid (USA, 1984).

One of the central themes that this blog will set out to explore is the question of work in kung fu cinema. At least, let's call it work for now, though the word stands at the heart of a complex of related terms, ranging from labour to effort, for example, and from toil to craft. Quite precisely the best term for that to which I am referring will have to be a subject for further investigation.

Indeed, in order to show how this thing I am (for now) calling 'work' is so very much at the heart of the martial arts film, and in order to begin to develop a closer investigation of quite how I would inflect this term, I propose a translation of kung fu itself as work (or, even, labour). If this seems a slightly wilful translation of the Chinese term gongfu (which is the pinyin spelling of the word rendered more commonly into English as 'kung fu'), the distortion is less shocking than it may at first appear to the untutored English ear, used as we are to understanding the word as simply the name for a Chinese style of fighting.

The first thing to say, of course, is that gongfu in its proper sense does not strictly speaking refer to martial arts: the Mandarin term for martial art is in fact wushu (wu=martial, shu=art). In contrast, before being taken up as a buzzword in the martial-arts movie craze, gongfu really simply meant any kind of a high level of skill or attainment: artistry, if you like. Thus one can have gongfu in a martial art, but also in cooking, painting, making tea, metalwork, arranging flowers, baking, firing ceramics, calligraphy, etc., etc.

The implication of the term, however, (missing in Western words such as artistry) is that the skill which one has attained is mastered through long, patient and arduous work. The character for 'gong' (功) - usually translated as attainment - includes the element 工 (also pronounced as 'gong') which means work or worker, labour or labourer. In quite literal terms, then, the question of work or labour lies inscribed at the very heart of the term kung fu itself, in the very name given most commonly to the genre of the martial arts film. As a pictogram, 工 may itself be derived from a tool, the tamper, with which earth was laboriously compressed by repeated pounding to make it into a building material. Furthermore, the other element of gong (i.e. 力, which on its own signifies power or strength) is derived from a pictogram representing a plough, doubly inscribing work at the heart of the word, and linking the 'kung fu fighting' we are dealing with in cinema to the old practices of peasant labour which were at stake in the martial arts discussed in a previous post on this blog. 功 is usually thus translated as power or strength: one online reference source on Chinese characters proposes a possible formation of it as 'power through work'. This same dictionary defines the whole word gongfu (功夫) as 'skill; art; kung fu; labor; effort'. If my translation lays central stress on one particular aspect of this little cluster of meanings, it nonetheless has the virtue of explaining something about how they fit together, and it also brings to the fore what is so insistent in the etymology of the character. (This insistence is so strong that one might be led to inquire as to what form of modern disavowal may be at work to erase it as a content from common translations which define 'kung fu' simply as a level of high attainment, or even as a term for the martial arts...)

Any forcing in my definition, I feel, is in any case validated by the fact that 'kung fu' is now not simply a Chinese term: torn from its 'original' linguistic use, it is now part of the vocabulary of a global popular-cultural phenomenon, and I am primarily concerned with this, modern, transnational word, transformed by its relation to and meaning within a cinematic genre.

The measure of the translation would thus be in what it clarifies about this global cultural phenomenon – and in how we might use it to understand something about the reality from which it springs. Whatever gongfu may have meant in the past, this meaning, having work at its heart, will have been transformed by the transformation of the nature and experience of labour itself by capitalism and by globalised, (post-)colonial relations.

My argument is that the kung fu film, which just like the cowboy film is so often set on a (heavily mythologised) temporal borderline between modernity and tradition, and which takes as its topic of fascination the labour-intensive and highly skilled military arts made obsolete by the import of modern firearms technologies, serves as a somewhat disavowed meditation on the vicissitudes of work: alienated and unalienated, ancient and modern, feudal and commodified...

Of course, to establish that what I propose here is a valid approach to kung fu cinema will involve looking in more detail at a set of examples, and demonstrating that work indeed is an important theme within the films (or at least one that illuminates them in a significant way). I will also have to show a link between the "kung fu" (i.e. martial arts) which forms the thematic core of the films, and to which the genre name "kung fu" refers and the representations of labour or work that the films develop.

This task is, obviously, beyond the scope of a single blog post, but to indicate a direction, I'll finish this with a few pointers to where I'm heading. The sub-genre which most clearly brings work to the fore of the genre is the 'training film', where a significant part of the film will be dedicated to depicting the hero straining to develop his skill, strength and flexibility through a montage of gruelling exercises. There are many of these films – the Jackie Chan vehicle Drunken Master, for example, or Lau Kar-Leung's 36th Chamber of Shaolin and its sequels – and I shall have to come back to enumerate more about these at a later point. Perhaps the film most familiar to the Western audience is John G. Avildsen's American revamp of the kung-fu flick, The Karate Kid (1984). Here the theme of training and the nature of work are picked up from the narrative pattern drawn from the Hong Kong originals it copies (perhaps in particular from Return to the 36th Chamber, of which I will certainly have more to say in this blog at a later date...).

In Karate Kid, then, 'Daniel-San' is taken on by teacher Mr. Miyagi, who, it seems, rather than teaching the punches and kicks his student expects to learn, sets him off to work on back-breaking menial tasks around his home – famously waxing cars, sanding decking, and painting both fence and house. Daniel despairs that he has learned nothing and just been conned into doing unwanted tasks, but, of course, it turns out that in these tasks he has been training his arms in the precise mechanics of a sequence of blocks and strikes, along with the strength and stamina to perform them effectively and repeatedly. Of course, what is at stake here in Daniel's acquisition of 'kung fu' is the line between alienated and unalienated labour: the work which consumes the worker's life draining the energies and resources of his or her body, and whose value accrues to a boss, set against the work which reproduces life and whose whose fruits return to the worker. Daniel's investment in the work of training accrues not only, or not centrally, to Mr. Miyagi, but to Daniel himself, who gains from his toil an enhancement of power, energy, wisdom and ability.

Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

Yesterday I was telling a colleague about the film La Dialectique, peut-elle casser des briques?, known in English as Can Dialectics Break Bricks? It was made in 1973 by Situationist René Viénet, and has been counted as the first full-length détourned feature film by the Situationist group. Similar to the Situationists' recaptioning of cartoons with anti-capitalist analysis, it involved the re-dubbing of a then-recent kung fu movie – Crush – with Situationist slogans and with commentary on recent world events. In the film's re-engineered narrative, the good guys become 'the Proletarians' and the bad guys become 'the Bureaucrats' (c.f. the 1968 slogan: 'We will not rest until the last capitalist is hung with the intestines of the last bureaucrat!')

The effect aimed at is, of course, largely somewhat comical, and undercuts any narrative involvement with a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt.

From YouTube: excerpts from Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973)

As I was saying to my colleague, I've not managed to dig up much about the background of Viénet's film, or why this martial arts movie was chosen for détournement, and I find myself with some perplexing questions about this, and about how the original film (directed by Tu Guangqi) might have been understood by Viénet and the Situationist group. Wikipedia (that great authority!) suggests that the aim was 'to adapt a "spectacular" film into a radical critique of cultural hegemony,' and the general strategy of détournement would indeed seem to suggest that it was precisely the most crude and commercialised products of Spectacular society which were targeted by the SI for appropriation, to be refitted as weapons of revolutionary consciousness. Indeed, in the 70s, at the height of the kung fu craze, these films often tended to be regarded by critics as cheap, worthless, contentless, exploitative and mind-numbing products of a culture industry seeking to distract its popular audience and brutalise its sensibility.

However, Crush might also have been a strange choice on such grounds. Like many Hong Kong productions of the early seventies (in particular in the wake of Bruce Lee's Fist of Fury) the scenario of the original film is clearly one in which colonial exploitation and resistance are at issue. Set in Korea under the Japanese occupation that lasted much of the first half of the twentieth century, the heroes (those turned by Viénet into 'the Proletarians') are the members of a martial arts school who start to resist the colonial violence of the militaristic Japanese forces. However potentially conservative the nationalistic dimension of its narrative, this is also a work about struggle and liberation from tyrranny in some of its most typically modern forms.

This is to say, the film was already highly suited to the new story which Viénet constructed. Crush is not just a tale of conflict and violence, but also a tale of (revolutionary?) struggle against oppression, and of the violence of an imposed bureaucratic regime. Viénet's 'Proletarians' are, in matter of fact, already very much proletarian in Tu Guangqi's original movie. The native martial arts they train in are antithetical to the violence and deculturation imposed by their oppressors, and in this much, and within the colonial context of the film's setting, whether or not dialectics really breaks bricks, brick-breaking is certainly a kind of a dialectic practice. In this regard, the détournement works so well only because the film was at least some distance towards being the critique which the Situationists wanted to make it into. The refashioning of the film thus starts to appear a little less devastatingly witty than it might appear to those for whom the historical situation alluded to in the original film is obscure. For evidence of such an audience, one can look at the comments on the film on its IMDB page, one of which, completely muddling the national origin of the film, mistakes the film as 'a hokey Japanese karate movie', hence not only missing the anti-colonial premise of the original, but even showing a complete blindness to the differences between Asian nationalities on the basis of which such might be read. Another comment wonders 'what the hell' the original was about, and a third proposes that the détourned film is 'a standard martial arts movie with all its gratuitous, relatively content-less violence'.

From today's perspective, it would seem strange if the Situationist group, with the history of anti-colonial struggle in France's own colonies (from Algeria to Vietnam) still fresh, and with the attention that these gained from the French left – and even within the Situationists' own critiques – would not have picked up on the political dimensions of the film which these IMDB reviewers miss. Viénet, in particular, was trained as a Sinologist and spent many years in China before being ejected for his opposition to Mao. However, there seems little in its redubbing which would seem to exploit or thematise such a relation to a pre-existing narrative of struggle and revolution. Could Viénet and colleagues possibly have been blind to it? What were, exactly, their attitudes to the film?

One might, for example, more generously set out to read the task of détournement here as attempting to 'liberate' a hidden subtext, to dredge it up to the light of day. This would fit the film into a certain tradition of critical theory which has attempted to look at (popular) cultural products as at once carrying the ideological purposes of the dominant class who control their production, but as also depending on a kernel of 'truth' and genuine need or desire which it must address in order not to entirely fail to interest its audience. However, this, too, would not seem to quite hit the mark: the 'anti-colonial' theme in Crush is so prominent as to hardly seem even a 'sub'-text, let alone something that anyone who has noticed it would think of as a repressed content which would need to be made conscious.

Alternatively, perhaps we might conceive of Crush – or more generally of the Parisian movie houses where 'chop-socky' flicks may have been playing matinee double bills – as a special site for Situationist pleasure, rather like the inner-city streets where Debord and his colleagues liked to drift in search of 'moments' of desire and truth within the everyday, places of special ripeness for the engineering of a 'situation' or an 'event'. Does Viénet's film thus mark the kung fu movie, then, for them, as one of the privileged locii in which one might go on a sort of a cultural dérive?

So in the end, I find myself running up against a question I cannot very simply answer (since my knowledge of Viénet and the Situationists is only rather general): what kind of a reading of Crush would have been available to the Situationist group? Would the status of such a product as 'schlock' have entirely determined their response, or might they have viewed it generously? Are we to read those more recent comments on the film which see it as deliberately refashioning a piece of the most debased cultural production for new ends as having missed a set of subtleties in its relation to the original, as having rather caricatured quite what such a détournement was supposed for the Situationists to do? Would the kind of 'postcolonial' discourse that might highlight themes of insurrection in the original film have been current? (Fanon had after all been writing since the 50s, but in many ways the kind of reading I am thinking of might be more associated with the wake of British Cultural Studies and the like from the later part of the 70s on...)

If anyone reading this blog knows more about this – or knows of anything written on the film – I'd be VERY glad to hear from you!

The full film is, by the way, available on UBU-web, at the following address:

http://www.ubu.com/film/vienet_dialectics.html

(Given that Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, in its very title and in its content too, sets out a certain discussion of revolutionary force/violence, the other question one might pose would be how Crush might open into such debates, too. What might it be like if we were to turn things around and imagine Crush as a redub of or a commentary on Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, rather than vice versa? How does Crush's depiction of violent resistance unsettle the arguments which Viénet attempts to impose on it? Would the understanding of Viénet's film that would emerge from such an analysis tell us something more generally about the attitudes and ideas of the European avant-garde?)

Peasant weapons

The above image is from Paulus Hector Mair's sixteenth-century encyclopedia of German martial arts. (A number of such Fechtbücher were produced during the late middle ages and early Renaissance). As well as including instructions for knightly techniques, Mair's encyclopedia discusses peasant weapons such as scythes, sickles and cudgels (pictured above).

For scans of the first two volumes see:

http://mdz10.bib-bvb.de/~db/bsb00006570/images/index.html

http://mdz10.bib-bvb.de/~db/bsb00007894/images/index.html

There are youtube clips of reconstructions of some of the techniques described by Mair for European peasant weaponry at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-cgClKJbGg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef9Xuzu3aa0

In the Chinese martial arts, there are also, of course, a number of weapons that derive not from military use, but from peasant tools: scythes, spades, staffs, knives, hoes, rakes, and, of course, rice flails – the iconic nunchaku of Bruce Lee derives from the Okinawan version of this last tool, and as M.T. Kato points out in From Kung Fu to Hip Hop: Globalisation, Revolution and Popular Culture (New York: SUNY Press, 2007), the development of the nunchaku as a weapon harks back to the ban on the native population carrying bladed weapons under Japan's occupation of Okinawa during the seventeenth century (pp.42-3).

Such weapons, then, were adaptations used for village self-defence, and speak of an 'other' martial art, aside from that created by the military. Kato even goes as far as to argue for two opposing categories: the officially-instituted, drilled, imperialist martial arts of order and discipline such as judo or the samurai sword on the one hand, and a more improvisatory and informal decolonising martial arts of resistance or revolt on the other – 'martial arts from below' as it were. (Of course, such an opposition seems to beg for deconstruction or dialecticisation...)

Monkey: What is that thing?

Pigsy: This? It was made for me by Lao Tzu.

Monkey: The Venerable Lao?!

Pigsy: It was to comepensate me for this incarnation. It's my muck rake...

In lieu of an introduction

I've tried to sit down and write an introduction to this blog a few times. However, each time, it becomes long and unweildy – and I can not imagine an internet reader ploughing their way through what I have written.

So this is written in lieu of an introduction. I'll have to carry out this full task elsewhere, probably in a series of posts, and I'll mark them as a "thread" – with a name like "starting points." The problem is that for me, there are just too many starting points for this project to get to grips with all at once. It's origins spread out like the root of a tree.

However, basically, the project perhaps starts with a kind of a problem, rather than an answer. it's a research project in search of a question, if you like.

It started for me with a collision of two things.

First, I was reading Fernand Braudel's trilogy of books Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800. This is a magisterial reading of the early history of capitalism, before its modern-day industrial manifestations. Braudel charts capitalism's slow growth, and its transformation of everyday ways of life. One thing (amongst many) that struck me was Braudel's description of the countryside and towns of the European middle ages and early modernity as heaving with perpetual unrest harbouring uprisings at a rate that perhaps even puts the twentieth-century in the shade. This contrasted with a "common-sense" understanding that I had – one which is supported in such accounts as Thompson's famous Making of the Working Class – that it was only the with the industrial revolution and its experiences of labour that a "revolutionary" political consciousness of class, exploitation, and of ordinary people's abilities to change their fate and the composition of their society developed.

At the same time as reading Braudel, I was watching quite a few kung fu movies – these have become, for me, something of a passion! The motif of revolting peasants from Braudel seemed to resonate with what I saw on screen. Revolt is a key theme within the kung fu genre, as is the problem, generally, of resisting tyranny and exploitation. The settings of kung fu films often involve a (fantasised) past – like Westerns, they obsess on that moment of transition between the modern and a world before modernity has fully arrived. They are primarily rural in setting, and so what we see so often in them are peasants in revolt.

This juxtaposition is more beset with problems than with any immediate solution – so many problems that in this introduction I can hardly even start to sketch out their outline, so will save this for later posts, too.

However, around the meeting of a Braudellian history of the longue durée of capitalism and martial arts cinema a number of fascinating issues/questions seem to intersect:

1. Does this collision help think traditions of revolution and revolt as stretching back into the (pre-industrial) past, and stretching forward into our own (post-industrial) present and its future?

2. Might popular culture (in spite of its highly Spectacularised and ideological nature) harbour cultural memories of such traditions, and are there resources in it for (future) popular movements?

3. What would kung fu films have to add to our thinking of the questions of revolutionary – or for that matter imperialist/capitalist/authoritarian/etc. – violence? (such questions of the ethical and practical nature of violence in revolt have been very much in the air in left-wing circles of late, for example in the writings of Badiou or Zizek; such debates seem to me, intuitively, to have much to do with the strange and double-edged histories of martial arts as on the one had military technologies of domination, and on the other a matter of traditional forms of popular defence and struggle...)

4. I'm also interested in the theme of work/labour, which is, of course, at the heart of Marxist analyses of capitalism and of its forms of exploitation. It's also, I think, an important and little-discussed theme in kung fu films. This is, however, probably something – like much I've said here – that remains, necessarily at this stage, at the level of suggestion rather than argument: it is something that the unfolding research of which this blog is a part will have to persuade people...