Sasha Rudensky sneaks a camera into the banya.

With the din of applause still reverberating from the Russian elections, the metallic face of former President Putin returns to the stage after little more than a brief interlude. And, harmoniously, Western media begins to swarm, with vague intimations of dictatorship turning into direct accusations. Yet, the 63% of the vote that Putin conjured ultimately inaugurates nothing short of a sense of uneasiness. There is an inexplicable dissonance between the brutal characterization of the Western media and the overwhelming popularity of the the Iron Hand within Russia. It seems that there must be some enigmatic explanation just out of grasp, casting its shadow upon the impenetrable curtain of Western media. Or have post-Cold War sentiments so solidified that it has become impossible for a Western gaze to grasp what it still considers to be the mysterious Russian soul?

Brooklyn-based photographer Sasha Rudensky dives into this very juncture–this hinge of untranslatability. Having emigrated from Russia, Sasha was submerged at a young age in the hurricane of the all-too-enthusiastic imagery that is the USA. But, even in her earliest work, she was already interested in this murky idea of her own half-lost Russianness. Consumed by the dimly lit steam of the banya, Sasha focused her lens on this strange and archaic tradition of giving oneself up to smoldering heat and the thrash of reeds. When I met with Sasha, she told me about how she sneaked into the banya with her camera hidden to snap of the perilous shots. Cut with a feeling of pubescence curiosity, these shadowy images are like peeking through some forbidden keyhole into the kingdom of ancient Rus.

* * * * *

In Remains, Sasha leaves the intimacy of the bathhouse and ventures into the desolation of the Russian freeze. Washed-out frames of apocalyptic Russian streets, Remains reverberates with an unsettling sense of calm. Seeing paint rubbed off a bedside wall and an abandoned watermelon rind, you can’t help but feel that turning your head, some spectral figure will climb into the frame. This eerie silence, Sasha would tell me, was influenced by the aesthetics of Vertov and brought to life by the Russian streets themselves. Echoing Derrida’s late reflections on hauntology, Remains lodges itself in a strange category of Being at the interstice between presence and absence. In the murmur after the fall of the Great World Experiment that was the Soviet Union, these pictures evoke the feeling of ice-cubes clinking to rest.

* * * * *

In Demons, Sasha experiments with darkly personal portraits. Her twisted Dostoevskian figures, bathed in baroque shadow, claw out of the frame. Carmine borscht drips from half-shrouded lips and a vampiric child squirms across the sheets. Demons stinks of a cryptic sexuality. The Soviet Union was a place where sex did not exist, Sasha joked. These photos unearth this hidden sexuality with ghoulish intimacy that would make Cartier-Bresson run for garlic. With a stinging pathos, gazing upon these, one is bitten by the all-too individual, the dangerously particular.

* * * * *

It is in her most recent collection, Novij Mir, “A New World,” that Sasha’s work comes into full repose. Synthesizing the dissonant quietude of Remains with the cutting intimacy of Demons, Sasha turns upon the surge of a new capitalist Russia. From oligarchic hubris to the clutter of kitsch, Novij Mir floats in a space that is personal yet political.  However, it is not merely the political dimension, but the formal experimentation as well that gives this collection depth. With the screech of a two-dimensional Range Rover, there is a wobbling dissonance between the real and the unreal. In the clash of image with image, one is trapped within the uncomfortable space of flat projection. But it is the candor with which the image admits its own artificiality that lures one from a cross-armed repose into a collision of perpetual simultaneity.

* * * * *

Similarly, one catches a glimpse of the iconic sparkle of a Russian hockey team, but, in a double-take, a sheet framed-up and camera poking out of the corner admit the image as a mere facade, the set of a movie. Yet, it is the artifice of the scene, mimesis of mimesis, that is the seduction of the image. In the candor of exposing its frame, the photo invites us to be surrounded by the surreal space of a New Russia. It is Sasha’s formal experimentation in Novij Mir that exposes the true inside of Russia–always already an outside, strangely Westernized, yet steeped in an undeniable self-identity. This is the ambiguous resurgence of a nation once bereft, both itself and other, a multiplicity ripping out of its own skin.

* * * * *

From within the torrent of monotone images of the monster that is New Russia, Sasha’s voice cries out. Translating and retranslating her own experience of Russianness turned American returning to the Motherland, Sasha has a unique window into the awkwardly shifting relations between two super-powerful former enemies. Perhaps it is in her conceptual experimentation that Sasha regains a documentary innocence that will shake up the Western gaze, all-too-habituated in its perspective on the Red Giant.

Cradled in evil, that Thrice-Great Magician, 
The Devil, rocks our souls, that can’t resist; 
And the rich metal of our own volition 
Is vaporised by that sage alchemist.

Charles Baudelaire — Les Fleurs du mal

There’s a scene in Andrzej Zulawski‘s Possession (1981) that is nearly unbearable to watch. When I broke my Zulawski virginity last month, publicly and without shame, in a surprisingly packed theater in Brooklyn, some chuckles broke loose when Anna (played brilliantly by Isabelle Adjani) was struck by a fit of hysterical self-abandonment in the underground tunnel of a Berlin train station. She thrashes, she screams, she slams milk and eggs onto the wall. Viscous liquids pour from her body, out of her eyes and ears and nostrils. The fit lasts for nearly five minutes. It feels much longer. And it looks absolutely, and unbelievably, believable. Yet, it’s in moments like these that we cannot believe. So we are thrown helplessly into the contradiction of believing and not believing; there’s your prompt to laugh, or to turn away.

These laughs are common enough entities. They are of the kind of helpless nervousness that overtakes us when the ordinary veil of meaning breaks apart into a torrential washing of the unknown. What else is the audience supposed to do in such an overwhelming encounter with a woman possessed irrevocably by madness? And it is funny! What could be funnier?

Zulawski, Poland’s enfant terrible film director, is quite aware that the laugh is also a form of uncontrollable possession. We do not choose to laugh but are seized by it, as if the ghost has inhabited our throats and demands escape only through the convulsion of our rumbling flesh. Possession articulates Zulawski’s keen eye for such strokes of violent excess and how they collapse unexpectedly into something a bit more demonic. At first, all too ordinary human beings find themselves drawn to typical ruptures of the prosaic: laughing, crying, cheating, transgressing this or that little taboo.  Soon enough, however, they are unwittingly seduced to the limits of self-annihilation, where desire eviscerates without reserve all that was left of meaning. For Anna, her seduction calls from a dark force all too familiar in film, but rarely rendered so horrific. I’m writing here of evil.

What begins as a simple episode of adultery spirals into the demonic belly of erotics, a wasted core of sexualized loss. Anna equivocates at first between returning to her husband (Sam Neill) and child, or leaving her stifling domestic life for an adventurous love affair with a beautifully sun-tanned man, Heinrich (Heinz Bennent), who is agilely equipped with a new age philosophy revolving around the intensified delights of sexual desire. Anna, instead, leaves them both to hide away in a deteriorating apartment just west of the Berlin wall. There, she establishes her hearth and conjures a beast from hell outside the lighted gaze of the camera.

What we do see is Anna having intercourse with the animal in a darkened back room of the apartment. At one point she tells an intruder that it’s tired because they made love all night long. One would expect that she would have fucked the demon, but these are her words, she said “made love,” and I’m still unsettled by it: There could be nothing more disquieting in this phrase so gracefully uttered without a hint of irony or crass.

However fatigued, that doesn’t stop the grotesque creature from feasting on unwanted guests. I’m at a loss to describe it. All I can say is that its twisted body resembles the octopus-like beasts portrayed elsewhere only in the fetid imagination behind Hentai, the popular brand of Japanese animated pornography occupying a corrosive interstice on the hinterlands of taboo. Beyond such tangible references, the festering sea creature calls out to the great depths of the ocean where unknown monsters reside still outside the grasp of even the most speculative scientific research. But the demon’s twisted corporeality suggests another dimension of the incomprehensible, an entangled nature. Each limb poses as a surrogate phallus whose mysterious powers can be invoked only through perverse rites of divination undertaken by Anna.

Thus we move from the transgression of daily enforced interdictions to the sundering of a human being. Anna wastes away into an anxious ridden gulf of nothingness. Recall the fit in the train station. I’ll try to summarize. Anna’s sexual relationship with this demon arises from the great abyss brought about by the loss of love, whose ciphering downfall wrecks language, minds, and bodies in one fell swoop of nightmarish hysteria. Such are the heights of pleasures in West Berlin, where the invocation of demons haunts our sordid utopias wherever we might imagine them. What is stunning and funny and horrible all at the same time is that Anna maintains herself in this abyss. She makes love to the beast. She doesn’t turn away. Her relations with evil are so erotically intensified that she orgasms continuously throughout the night.

That night, as I walked home from the theater, frightened and somewhat ill at ease, I felt as if ghosts lurked within every sewer drain, each rumble of the train, within the smokey glare of the street lights reflected in the rain soaked pavement. Instead of sleeping, I picked up another gifted conjurer of the unknown: Georges Bataille, whose collection of essays, “Literature and Evil,” attests to the idea that the essence of literature hinges on facing up to the blank stare of evil. Bataille writes in the introduction: “Literature isn’t innocent, and it should admit itself as guilty.” By intensifying our relation with the desire for evil, we discover its sovereign value. While this may throw into suspension the distinction between good and evil, whose disruptive movement, in turn, arrests labor, unworks action, and interrupts discourse, Bataille writes, we approach another ethical domain through this loss: a “hypermoral.”

I couldn’t write on evil until a few weeks after seeing the film, once the images started to dissipate  into the unseen shadows from where they first unwittingly emerged. I haven’t said much about it, either, but that’s the problem that evil poses for any writing, showing, thinking. Possession, though, will always be at hand whenever I am struck by the desire to risk myself in its dangers. I admit that I haven’t figured out who gets the last laugh.

If you have the system for it, the rumble in your bones. If you don’t have the system for it, the familiarity of sound blown out beyond audible: the aural equivalent of an overexposed photo. Paralleled visually in the music videos accompanying songs featuring drone: stark blacks and whites, television noise.

Something in between the guitar-drone of shoegaze and the low-end vibrations of house and dubstep bass. Lulling and monotonous like the former, but colder, more industrial, digitized.  Monophony with glitches. This drone, like its ancient predecessors, represents nothingness, but no longer a transcendental nothingness. A manmade, urban emptiness. The static left when everything else falls away, evocative of apocalypse and decay. Assuming you believe the tree makes no noise when it falls in the forest if there is no human left to hear it, drone is the last sound on earth.

Watch & listen to the full playlist created for this post on Hydra’s Youtube channel:

Burial released Kindred on Hyperdub earlier this month, one of the few statements from the enigmatic British producer following his two full-length records, Burial and Untrue, in 2006 and 2007 respectively. Although the record clocks in at a saturated 30 minutes, it’s composed of only three songs–”Kindred,” “Ashtray Wasp,” and “Loner”–beautiful and disquieting tracks, whose unfolding motions decompose, recompose into deformed shapes, only to fall again into another cipher of fragmented sound.

The materiality of decay shadows the entire record. Syncopated rhythms resonate with compounding force but feel brittle, as if the roundness of the drums is about to burst, reduced forever to ash and smoke. The fall of raindrops clashes against metallic fixtures, or coalesces around a sewage drain, or just falls in parallel streams, enclosing the furtive low end bass in claustrophobia. Crackling and popping pervades the songs, calling to mind the decay of dusty vinyl records or the rusted feedback of old studio equipment. Vocals emerge out of the shattered drum patterns– faded, disrupted, looped in circles around rave’s desiring economy of love and loss: “I want you,” “I belong to you,” “Hold on,” or curdled into wordless evocations of noise, short-circuited into raw and desperate particles.

A few writers have attributed the term hauntology to Burial’s music in order to pinpoint its unsettling mood of mourning. His funereal sounds seem to evoke ghosts of rave’s recent past, recovering lost traces of percussion, synthetic melody, and soulful vocals that would compose much of the utopia dreamed up by dance music in the late 1980s and early ’90s, as well as the Dionysian festivals that corresponded to their celebration. But now, Burial’s shards of rave are re-staged in a present where they take on the effect of the uncanny, summoning something awry in this disjointed crossing of times. We listen to a return of another buried destiny, at friction with our own temporality.

The notion of hauntology is culled from Jacques Derrida’s book, the Specters of Marx, in which Derrida calls for an unlikely reading of Hamlet in order to trace the ruins of Marxism that still inhabit the present. The task is not strictly to mark out the ways in which the past informs the present, but rather, to trace a threshold between absence and presence, a haunted space, whose specters still trouble our horizons. This threshold calls for our address, just as the ghost of Hamlet’s father demanded from his son an infinite debt that could never be fully repaid, and thus a heritage never restored. In a much belabored quote from Shakespeare:

And still your fingers on your lips, I pray.
The time is out of joint. O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right.
Nay, come, let’s go together.

Klee's 'Angelus Novus' to which Benjamin addresses his thesis on the angel of history.

Derrida writes that mourning ”consists always in trying to ontologize remains, to make them present, in the first place by identifying the bodily remains and by localizing the dead.” This identifying the dead, this bringing to present the remains of a fragmented past, does not necessarily sustain the lost event, so as to redeem its destiny, but casts it against the trajectory of a time that it may no longer agree with: ”Each time it is the event itself, a first time is a last time. Altogether other. Staging for the end of history. Let us call it a hauntology.”

In our time–so overloaded with retro, kitsch, a collage of generations, stuck in the perpetual return of the ’80s, ’90s, ’50s–does this hauntological staging still have the power to shock us into the recognition of what we are mourning? Or are we already rendered numb to its technique?

What is so striking about Burial’s music is that he does not settle for narratives of stagnant repetition, as if past modes of music and affect can return without residue. Instead, Burial brings music into ruination. He arrests us in the ruination of rave, that wonderfully euphoric electronic utopia, making an all so anxious leap from a music of redemption to one of catastrophe.

The music of ruination means not simply the process whereby something called the ruin is produced, written, communicated, or listen to. It also means music done by the ruination–a disaster which ruins music, wrecks sound and language. To summon another writer of the ruin, or the disaster, Maurice Blanchot: “The disaster is related to forgetfulness–forgetfulness without memory, the motionless retreat of what has not been treated–the immemorial, perhaps.”

How are we to be awakened to fragments of what we have lost, when any real sense of this history has gone dead? I cannot help but return to the writings of Walter Benjamin, the thinker who in many ways resides at the disjointed source of Derrida’s hauntology. In his theses on history, Benjamin describes an image of the angel of history. The angel faces away from where we are heading, towards the ruins of the past, pulled forever away from what he hopes to recollect. “Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed.” Burial’s dirges may reside somewhere within that moment of suspension.

1. The Future Perfect

Lars Von Trier, Melancholia (2011)

All popular indications of 2011 pointed towards the future imperfect. Ignore the false prophecies; the tense to be in 2012 is the future perfect:

[U]sed to describe an event that is expected or planned to happen before another event in the future. It is a grammatical combination of the future tense, or other marking of future time, and the perfect, itself a combination of tense and aspect. [Source: Wikipedia].

2011: We witnessed the end of the world, over and over again. May 21 came and went. A nuclear plant melted down. Our films showed us the world colliding with astral bodies; life turning to ashes; ashes turning to stars. We watched disease ravage our species, and aliens destroy our civilization – in 3D.  Britney danced until the world ended, and the Soft Moon played the world into decay. International lit-mag Words Without Borders devoted an issue to the Apocalypse, including an obituary for God, and correspondence to the aforementioned decedent regarding the difficulties of constructing an Ark. Also: a dispatch from a McDonalds, where the author awaited the end of days. Artists Bigert & Bergström experimented with eschatology and created, in collaboration with Cabinet, a calendar for the end of world – “starring comets, aliens, floods, returning messiahs, and more.” Britain’s Tate museum presented an exhibition of paintings depicting biblical disaster entitled “Apocalypse.”

In 2012 we will have experienced the apocalypse, yet remain in anticipation of it.  Expect the narration of your literature and the perspective of your poetry to adjust accordingly. Performers and artists will will shift the locus of their experimentation from “omens” to “eulogies” and “wakes.” Music will anticipatorily sound like it has been dug out the wreckage; musicians will further pursue the wow & flutter of music played back on a disintegrating cassette tape. All of this reminiscent of what Jose-Luis Moctezuma has described as “a standpoint of oblivion . . .  a perspective of the Anachronism. The Anachronism of the Human Species.”

Billboards, 2011

This year, our journalists and editorialists will be preemptively preoccupied with the question: “What happened?” The U.S. presidential election of 2012 will also center on this question, with the exceptionalist addition of “-to America?”  In the words of Newt Gingrich’s friend, we have shifted from “Yes we can” to “Why we couldn’t.”  Though perhaps the question might more be more appropriately phrased: “What have we wrought?” — as Junot Diaz suggested in his vanguard post-Ap, future-perfect essay in the Boston Review last May:

I suspect that once we have finished ransacking our planet’s resources, once we have pushed a couple thousand more species into extinction and exhausted the water table and poisoned everything in sight and exacerbated the atmospheric warming that will finish off the icecaps and drown out our coastlines, once our market operations have parsed the world into the extremes of ultra-rich and not-quite-dead, once the famished billions that our economic systems left behind have in their insatiable hunger finished stripping the biosphere clean, what we will be left with will be a stricken, forlorn desolation, a future out of a sci-fi fever dream where the super-rich will live in walled-up plantations of impossible privilege and the rest of us will wallow in unimaginable extremity, staggering around the waste and being picked off by the hundreds of thousands by “natural disasters”—by “acts of god.”

** An Exclusive Tip for Hydra Readers: When language finally goes public in August, we recommend you invest in “will have” and “decline.”

You will want to be mindful of the prophet who will advise us that the Rapture already happened, but we were all “left behind.” It is time to rewatch Terminator, read Homestuck, turn your gaze backwards, contemplate chronology.

2. Drift & Wobble

Terrence Malick, "Tree of Life" (2011)

2011 was a year of  unanchoring.  While the few possessors of static power attempted to hunker down in their burrows, the masses detached themselves from institutions, political parties, dictators; dismantled those barriers that wouldn’t budge; poured into public spaces.  In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, personhood unhitched from the body, ending centuries of the primacy of the individual, signaling the coming age of incorporation: the age of politics without identity, everyone the anonymous speaker behind an amorphous “PAC.” The Tea Party, ever prescient, sensed the coming contamination, hence their shrieking through 2011.  Foreigners in our midst, gays in our military, Kenyans in our White House.  All this a futile flailing out against the advent of fluctuation and multiplicity, the demise of the discrete, the blurring of boundaries. In a word: “wobble.” Wobble reflected sonically this past year in the tremors of “brostep,” in the psychedelic flux between dream life and wakefulness of hypnagogic pop.

Now unmoored, we will drift. We will disperse like ink into water.

Like osmosis, like a reverse infection, we will all find it impossible to stop ourselves from bleeding into unchosen territories. We will move through entities we may not wish to move through.  The popular phrase “agent provocateur” from the Occupy encampments will seem increasingly absurd.  Everyone will be coopted. Everyone will coopt.  Voters will continue to float from candidate to candidate. The lines between ideologies will become ever fuzzier, parties and factions ever more porous. There will be no deviation that can maintain itself as deviant.  Will Anonymous infiltrate the Cartels? Will the Cartels buy their way into Anonymous? Who will be the absorbed/assumed and who the absorber/assumer?

Genres and eras will accelerate towards each other, leading to crashes that will create new artistic-visual-musical-molecular structures. We will witness the final dissolution of rigidly delineated social groups (i.e. subcultures) attached to a genre. Artists will preoccupy themselves with the project of producing “uncategorizable” cultural products, works outside/beyond genre, even while they cross geographic and temporal boundaries to borrow mercilessly from scenes gone by or far-flung.

Although we will no longer be a society of enclosures, magnetism will remain in the system.  This nodal organization will privilege charisma (though that privilege will always be fleeting).  2012 will be a good year for gurus, for messiahs, for TV psychics, Malcolm Gladwells, and Ron Paul. There will be a dramatic uptick in the occurrence of Jerusalem Syndrome.

Without borders there will be no borderlands, no transgressions. Most of us will spend the year connecting to new nodes, forging new networks and constellations.  For the radical, though, the challenge of 2012 is to be fugitive, to cast oneself further adrift into abandoned territories, into interstices and silences, forgotten spaces where ruptures may be discovered, moving constantly outwards like the expanding universe.

3.  Alchemy

Spoek Mathambo, 2011

The occult themes of 2011 will multiply this year. Post-apocalypse, our artists will now explore their undead selves. It has already been creeping up on us: the return and reinvention of darkwave and goth, musical representations of decay, the rise of Zola Jesus, Spoek Mathambo’s eerie Township Tech.  2012 will be the year that everyone grits their teeth and concedes that Pitchfork was onto something with that “witchhouse” meme that inspired so much shit-talking in 2010.  Expect more theremin in your music, more drone in your electronica – dissonance, distortion, and chromatic scales.  The interest in creating horror soundtrack revived by the Odd Future crew (see: Goblin) will be taken up by other, older heads.  This darkness will be in search of some transcendence. In 2012 someone will create something that sounds like a hip-hop “Godspeed You Black Emperor” album.

(Also, there will be more progressive “progressive R&B,” and more of it.  But that’s neither here nor there.)

JLG, "Film Socialisme" (2010)

As currency becomes asymptotically meaningless, and gold becomes the subject of interest for Ron Paul and the rest of us, there will be a renewed interest in alchemy.  Speculation in this most precious of metals will reach even more dramatic heights. But instead of seeking the substance that transforms baser metals, the emphasis will be on pulling gold bars out of the ether. The private sector will invest its every last dollar into cultivating new forms of divination by numbers.

The greatest alchemic leap of 2012 will be that of the human soul to the cloud.  Apple enabled iCloud in the fall of 2011, calling upon users to store their data—documents, photos, notes, music, memories—in remote servers and to auto-sync their appliances to this central hub. A prophecy, a threat, a promise by Steve Jobs: “We are going to move… the center of your digital life into the cloud.” Applying already existing technologies, the “wired individual” will in 2012 complete the outsourcing of her memories and experiences, setting the groundwork for collective cyber-consciousness as a means of transcendence. The organizing hope of this new era is articulated by the ad copy for one of 2011′s most popular apps:

You’re seconds away from having perfect memory!  Evernote is ready to collect all of your ideas, experiences, thoughts, and memories into an always-accessible place. Take down your inspirations and ideas as they happen.

Call it a gothic materialism, perhaps. Now our scientists look to other metals, to the conductivity of copper and fiberoptic cables, as a means to perfect our capabilities, as a way to purify the human soul.  His theory of relativity disproven, Einstein in 2012 will be recognized as the mystic and sorcerer he really was.  Our old ones having failed us, we will climb down ever darker tunnels in search of new gods.

——-

This article is part of a survival guide for the year 2012, which will be issued here, exclusively at Hydra, in irregular installments. Jump to previous installments:  1 | 2 | 3

How fun it is to say “the Internet went on strike today.” Of course, e-commerce went on trucking along, but protest actions by giants like Google and Wikipedia, Craigslist and reddit made sure only Luddites and the willfully blind would remain ignorant of the ongoing controversy surrounding the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act (SOPA/PIPA), pending legislation that threatens the structure and spirit of the web. Wikipedia’s English-language page “went dark” in protest of the bill; Google replaced its iconic logo with a censor bar; Tumblr enabled its users to “black out” their pages for the day; WordPress created plugins to allow bloggers to do the same.

These are the big guys, who have big stakes in the future free flow of information. The fate of lil’ guys like Hydra is, for now, tied up with theirs. We publish on a WordPress platform from our Mozilla browsers, we garner readership and comments from Google hits and Tumblr, and (perhaps more often than we’d like to admit) our research forays bring us into the bowels of Wikipedia.

Better and more qualified policy wonks have explained the nuts and bolts of how SOPA/PIPA will stifle innovation, encroach on free speech. Instead of attempting a clumsy recap, or pretending that anyone in Congress would notice our humble blog’s blackout, we offer a tailored account of what the implications of these laws would be for us, and perhaps for others like us.

Our mission statement as it stands is simple: to undertake – to experiment with – the essay in an online format.  We once considered a more fleshed-out attempt to explain ourselves in a discussion that dissolved into the ether of email inboxes:

Hydra is a collective of writers with varied interests, bound together by a vision of what is possible when the strength of life perseveres and pushes against the wire and concrete. We reject containment. We are world-town and we are polycephalic. “Without the possibility of parole.” We smash sentence, we write.

Begun as a dream in the misty oviduct of the Northern California Bay Area, its original heads have split or moved, moved and split, and are now spread over this lizard-green globe. Following a range of callings, our interests span the cultural, political, and galactic spheres of life. This is to insinuate that, in our minds, the cultural, political, and galactic spheres of life are inseparable domains. Therefore, following such as what we might call our editorial policy, we strive and look for the indivisible and the syncretic, the symbiotic and the cross-fertilized. These are aspects of what might be called a borderzone standpoint. And in this magazine are its highways to tomorrow’s classical thought.

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Concretely, what does this mean? We are interested in exploring and cultivating new practices of online criticism, such as:

• Use of the hyperlink – to engage in dialogue with the ideas and words of other writers and artists, to cross-reference our own articles in order to build and elaborate on cohesive intra-publication themes, to highlight the intertextuality and multi-vocal character of our writings, to reference external material without disturbing narrative flow, to replace formal citations, to offer readers the option of more fragmented, non-linear, and/or autonomous modes of reading that can lead to independent exploration (surfing) and multitasking (especially with the use of “tabs”).
• Use of embedded media -  to more precisely reference the musical/cinematic/visual works that we wish to comment upon,  to set tone and atmosphere and to suggest context or trains of thought better alluded to than written out, to demonstrate synchronicity between ideas and artworks across different fields and temporal divides, to speak in the format and parlance of music blogs and experiment with the idea of article as mixtape, as bricolage, for juxtaposition, as pastiche, to create written works fully fused with visual and auditory elements, which is to say, to create “essays” that are also “experiences.”
• Multiplatform publication / microblogging – to find readership, like-minds, and fellow enthusiasts (particularly, with regard to our more obscure interests), to engage in the discipline of keeping ourselves concise,  to play with redigesting, disassembling, and reconstructing our own product, to recognize ourselves as part and parcel of the content-producing masses.

SOPA/PIPA threaten these exact tools, the building blocks of our experiment. And on a more basic level, by endangering the vitality of the online spaces where we meet up and interact,  SOPA/PIPA could preclude the maintenance of psychically-bonded-but-geographically scattered, borderzone families like ours.

If it sounds far-fetched that all this could be put in jeopardy under the auspices of enhanced copyright enforcement, consider the very real possibility of an Internet Black List of alleged infringers — part of the original SOPA/PIPA drafts — that could knock sites off the web.  Take a look at the structural parallels with the Great Chinese Firewall. Hell, look at hip hop bloggers, and the crazy, Orwellian shit the American government has already done to them.

This legislation imperils the the type of syncretic and cross-fertilized creative expressions that we find most inspiring. The anti-circumvention provisions before Congress would hobble the efforts of international activists to evade internet censorship, surveillance, and persecution, further isolating us from the dissident artists residing under repressive regimes that are well-beloved by our editorial staff. At risk are technologies like Tor, the anonymising software that masks users’ IP addresses, which was instrumental during the Egyptian protests. Also VPNs, proxies, etc.

Simply put, SOPA/PIPA are at odds with the development of shit we like to talk about, and how we talk about it. Such as: the art that has flourished through the new media of Youtube, Google Streetview. Such as: cross-border musical flows. Can you imagine Worldtown without the World Wide Web? Without online mixtapes, the international blogosphere, or soundcloud? These laws would impose an untenable drag on parody, remix, assemblage, homage, détournement, cover/fan art and (horror of horror) the proliferation of memes.  Which is to say – if and when the Revolution comes, we will stand with Cheezburger.

Albrecht Durer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. — Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

The end of the year prompts all sorts of rituals of recollection. We’ve once again revolved around the sun, and to prepare us for the celestial rhythms of the next cycle, turning our gaze backwards allows us to reflect on where we’re heading, as if no great distance separated the before from the after. To some remarkable extent, we’re still here, alive on the planet, although we might not be so confident of our stay for much longer. This year, the proliferation of apocalyptic tales, natural disasters, eschatological nightmares, and the perpetual recycling of end of history lamentations have permeated the inclinations of both popular and unpopular culture, especially in music (and film, too, as Hydra’s Jose-Luis Moctezuma relays), spreading its virus through the subterranean fringes, and whatever one might still call the avant-garde.

Perhaps we’ve come to take seriously some of the unnerving considerations proposed by philosopher Ray Brassier, that our impending extinction requires our deepest reflection, one which should reorient our thinking away from the anthropocentric framework of the Copernican Revolution, to regions unbound by the gravitational pull between earth and sun. Enlightenment requires an absolutely unhuman mode of thinking, living, creating. Unhinging ourselves, as Brassier prescribes, would certainly follow to its end the internal logic of what Simon Reynolds recounts in his book published earlier this year, Retromania: Popular music has turned its activities to the past, bewitched by the ruins of history and recordings, disjointed from its temporal circumstances by the internet’s diffusive mode of networking and distributing information. But if the difference between past, present, and future no longer holds in any simplistic chronological order, what then becomes of history, of world-annihilation, without an end in sight?

Mark Fisher, who has written imaginative politico-economic examinations of  music on his blog, K-Punk, suggests in his recent book, Capitalist Realism, that our current obsession with annihilation reflects a stifled awareness that, in our post cold-war malaise where we are frozen by the never ending war on terror, we can no longer even envision an escape from late capitalism–a horizon outside the ever expanding frontiers of the market system in which everything is swallowed. His diagnosis certainly gains some weight from the year’s many events of unrest, from the revolutions invoked by the Arab Spring, and its continuing struggles, the Eurozone’s teetering on the edge of collapse, to the global eruption of physical occupations of the idea of Wall Street. Nevertheless, earlier this year, a Christian radio broadcaster’s warnings of rapture did not come to pass. Twice. But now, the dawn of 2012, and the fabled end of the Mayan calendar, is upon us.

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As for music itself, few releases captivated this year’s disoriented, apocalyptic zeitgeist as well as James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual. Conceptually daring, alienating, horrifically ordinary and optimistic in the most disturbing way possible–Far Side Virtual is a nearly unlistenable musical theory of the technological dream in which we are all enraptured. Ferraro pulls sonic detritus from iPhone apps, computer start-up noises, ringtones, late 1980s and early ’90s infomercials and commercials, Pixar films, and music scrapped from video games menus and end game sequences. While anchored in references to synth-pop, Far Side‘s virtually encoded soundscape is modified through an Apple laptop with digital beds of drum patterns and glowing, synthetic shine.

At first, I couldn’t quite figure out Ferraro’s stance: sincere, ironic, critical? What I’ve determined, though, is that his intention doesn’t matter much. Ferraro’s artistic talent lies in a phenomenological sensitivity for hyper-realism: the way contemporary, digitally networked technology is altering our way of desiring, connecting, committing. In interviews, he has reported to tap into this hyper-realism in strip malls in Los Angeles, St. Marks in New York, and the global non-space of Starbucks cafes. After listening to the album a few times, just on tinny laptop speakers, I’ve come to find myself exiled to a strange sensation of lost, endless time within an enhanced world, one whose cycles arhythmically (un)balance the rapid production and satisfaction of distributed desire. It’s spontaneous and overwhelming.

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Many music journalists come to understand and listen to Ferraro’s music in terms of the theoretical framework of hypnagogic pop, a concept initiated by The Wire’s David Keenan set to mark the recent emergence of lo-fi rock evoking a nebulous psychological state between being awake and dreaming. Is this space something of the last frontier? Given the kind of anxiety and unrest Ferraro’s work inspires, and the hyper-sterilized space within which it puts into motion its labor, the hypnagogic might just establish the deterritorialized boundaries for a new sort of mobilization. Simon Reynolds sums it up concisely: ”Perhaps the secret idea buried inside hypnagogic pop is that the ’80s never ended. That we’re still living there, subject to that decade’s endless end of History, killing time as we wait for something (seismic, subaltern) to rupture the dream.”

Ferraro wasn’t the only musician this year to harness the kitsch of the dream and remagnetize the tech-utopia of waking life. John Maus, also working within the sphere of 1980s synth-pop, produced an excellent record of romantic solipsism and city-living despair. In short, he wrestles with the Enlightenment myth of our alleged autonomy over our desires, and seeks out his true desire in the most unlikely sonic resonances. Maus named his record We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves after the 12th thesis of French philosopher Alain Badiou’s fifteen theses on contemporary art, published in issue 23 of Lacanian Ink:

Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.

Maus, like Ferraro, struggles to pass the threshold, without contamination, into those spaces unheralded, neglected, or forgotten by Empire–post-industrial detritus, everyday noise, abandoned infrastructure, lost time–where the markings, traces, and graffiti of outsider desire thrive. The young hip-hop producer of Dipset fame, Araabmuzik, found the source of his scrawl in the shadow of 1990s trance, some of the most ecstatic, optimistic, and highly marketed music to ever subject millions of alleged Dionysian initiates to the rush of the rave, the utopian reveries of the bass drop. I wrote on Araabmuzik’s record, aptly titled Electronic Dream, in late summer, and still marvel on its way of uncovering the dark, even tragic motivation, of classic Eurodance cheese. The haunted underbelly of trance is revealed through unsettling bass patterns, nearly arhythmic percussion, and a gurgling dose of demonic synthetic keys, all which suffocate the false idols, kitschy optimism, of the source material which he attacks, perverts, and desiccates. An unliving, underground stream awakens.

Any end of the year recap also has to account for the resurgence of the overground stream of raves in 2011. A resurgence which helped a previously unknown emo screamer turned dubstep producer, Scrillex, garner five Grammy nominations, including best new artist. Yes, dubstep has gone mainstream, a sequence launched at the beginning of the year by Britney Spears, and culminated in the easily digestible electronic rhythms of Scrillex (and a dubstep Korn album?). But despite the increasing monotony, and consistently conventional masculinity of the genre, sometimes disparagingly, or lovingly, labeled bro-step, something is left to be said of Scrillex’s bizarre music video for “First of the Year (Equinox).” If we could generalize from its narrative, and the video’s popularity at nearly 30 million views, then I have to say something is disturbing about millions of festival goers across the country identifying with a little girl who resists a pedophile’s advances through the angsty violence of Scrillex’s wobble, wobble, bass. This music doesn’t exactly mirror the utopian trance of Paul Oakenfold’s ’90s, but has mutated in the conditions of depressed times, diagnosing the general disillusionment with, yet attachment to, the dream plaguing a great deal of America’s everyday, middle-class populace.

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Some more unsettling explorations of masculinity come from Los Angeles’s Odd Future collective and Sacramento’s Death Grips. While Scrillex sycophants scorn the figure of the pedophile-like good upholders of resentful ethics, Tyler, the Creator surprisingly found a way to incarnate a kind of moral decrepitude in Goblin that prompted music critics and listeners to wage in ceaseless battles over censorship. Although Tyler fell just as quickly he rose, it seemed like no one from either side of the debate actually listened to his music. Whatever your stance on the moral caliber of his raps, Tyler’s serpent-like nihilism holds up as an antithesis to Alain Badiou’s call for us to become the “pitiless censors” of ourselves: his free reign of desire somehow taps into an illicit territory which resists facile consummation. I credit this to Tyler’s musical schizophrenia more so than any rebellious talent, one whose psychological disintegration produces a multiplicity of contradictory perspectives on a festering decay haunting both our most banal-seeming and repressed desires. Hugely popular R&B saviors, Drake and The Weeknd, on the other hand, promote a kind of self-indulgence and sexual decadence that fits all too perfectly into typologies of capital. Although, I have to admit that I find great, thoughtless pleasure in listening to The Weeknd.

Drummer Zach Hill’s side project, Death Grips, also has just as little remorse for moralists. Their release, Ex Military, sounds like the biological weaponry of Cannibal Ox, deconstructed into feverish noise and maniacal slaps of bass–nightmarish landscapes of sound recalling the destructed bio-mechanical ecologies of dystopian films from the likes of Ridley Scott and George Miller. On “Guillotine,” MC Ride spits raw verses, his voice barking a kind of incomprehensible language, whose tenor joyously approaches the precipice of apocalyptic implosion. Music, even sound, becomes dehumanized, embodying to the extreme Ray Brassier’s concept of “the unlife”. The specter of Brassier, implied in its extreme nihilism, haunts a number of releases, this year. Another brilliant record from Hype Williams, One Nation, begins with pure morbidness: a gruff voice appears from the shadows in an untitled track over sparse dub rhythms and swirling John Carpenter synth lines, insisting on the need for the living to face up to mortality: “but of course everyone dies, and you will too.” The record heeds this wisdom, playing with the fleeting character of recycled sounds from UK bass, as if they are all about to wisp away as soon as they appear.

One of the most evocative listens of the year, Kuedo’s Severant invokes the lost paradise of Scott’s Blade Runner with a recharged urgency. “Vectoral,” in particular, beautifully echoes Vangelis’s soundtrack, reframing the synthetic pulse within footwork rhythms, programmed breakdowns, and drum machine gusts of digitally-manufactured liquid wind. More than a few musicians found inspiration in the frenetic, tinny grooves bubbling up from the hoods of South and West Chicago in the form of footwork. Descending from the same sort of post-industrial depressed economies that brought about Detroit techno and ghetto-tech bootlegs, footwork sounds strangely like UK drum n’ bass or grime, as if the Black Atlantic diaspora of electronic rhythms cyphered towards synchronic destinations despite their regional dislocation. DJ Rashad’s Just a Taste EP booms with poly-percussive rhythms that shift abruptly in winding drum patterns while vocal cuts dissolve into looped beats of flittering noise. A good introduction to footwork is the second volume of Bangs & Works on Planet Mu, a compilation tracing the grooves in their constant ascension, without any final horizon in sight–after all, this is music essentially made for the dance floor.

What Kuedo’s Severant does best is guide desire to take pleasure in loss, transforming nostalgia into renewal–invigorating the shadowed wastelands perhaps once formed and shaped by Empire, but since forgotten, thrown into the gutter to rot and decay. The two releases of the year which I keep coming back to, Laurel Halo’s Hour Logic EP and Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica, conjure a kind of mournful alienation that bridges the apocalyptic character of melancholia with an ecstatic resoluteness. While Laurel Halo prefers a symbiosis between percussion and ambient fluxes pushing bio-engineered corpse of techno to new heights of potency, Oneohtrix’s alchemy consists in the sounds of analogue ambient–flooded synth melodies, electric surges, and sparse piano keys–eerily unbounded in a ghostly absence of percussion.

From turning our gaze backwards, and recycling lost time, a new music is emerging: hyper-real, intensely emotional, richly theoretical, outside anachronistic sentiments for the acoustic or authentic–slowly paving way for the impending rupture to come.

Here now are Hydra Magazine’s top ten films of 2011:

10. The Tree of Life — dir. Terrence Malick (USA)

9. Nostalgia for the Light – dir. Patricio Guzmán (Chile/Germany/France)

The thirst for cosmic presence, cosmic relevance, is one that does not leave us even when we are at our most ordinary and vulnerable. The Tree of Life’s analeptic urgency demanded something of an escape into cosmic refraction, but where it seemed to stumble upon the insurmountable obstacles of New Age aesthetics, Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (its title borrowed from a book by astronomer-poet Michel Cassé) succeeds in restricting its intellectual and emotional interests to symmetries of a less ornamental nature. The Atacama Desert in Chile is the driest desert on earth; for reason of its dryness and clarity of air, it is the site of two different (and seemingly unrelated) activities: its high altitude provides the ideal atmosphere for the research of two major astronomical observatories, from which distant galaxies are glimpsed and studied; but the desert’s vastness was also, tragically, the preferred dumping site for the assassinated political victims of the murderous Pinochet regime. The search for distant stars and planets instantly absorbs into itself the (self-same) search for the murdered victims of a grievous (and terribly recent) political past. If the stars and planets are the effects of a million years gazing back at us, then our own contemporary present is nothing less than a fleeting illusion, the momentary trace of astral states depleted long ago. An archaeology of memory, of the past that cannot, must not, be abandoned, hence, assumes a magnitude equal to that of the pain and voracious desire to know, which drives mothers, scientists, sisters, and astronomers to locate their celestial origins in the mineral sleep “of what is past, or passing, or to come.” The mournful search for the bones of the dead, beneath a moisture-less sedimentation occasionally sprinkled by the salt of fallen, minuscule teardrops, finds resonance in the daily, patient work of lonesome astronomers. Thus, “the calcium which we carry in our bones, the bones which the dead offer up to the living as consolation, is the same calcium that the farthest stars are made of, the same dust that has fallen over eons on the crust of the Atacama, and which has shaped constellations out of the remains of prehistoric man.”

8. Meek’s Cutoff — dir. Kelly Reichardt (USA)

Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff unravels with very little exposition; dialogue is muttered almost inaudibly, as if we were accidentally stumbling upon the middle of someone else’s conversation. Natural sounds blend in with human voices, sounds that describe the economy and daily chores of living permanently on the road: wind passing through blankets on a makeshift clothesline, spoons tapping and scraping on metal plates, the crackle of someone lighting a pipe or stoking a campside fire, the murmur of a devout woman reciting Bible verse, her husband splashing water in his face in the light of early morning. Events occur strictly on the plane of the immediate present, irregardless of the overtly historical character of the costume and proceedings — we are somewhere near to, but also very far from, the Oregon Trail, and we, along with a small group of emigrants traveling on a harsh wagon road known to posterity as the Meek Cutoff, are lost in the blank unfolding of the present, bewildered by the vast openness of the road and humbled by our incapacity to perceive anything more significant than the sight of the mute sun rising, and setting early, on a monotonous and water-starved landscape. Reichardt makes no effort at romanticizing or mythologizing the pastness of the past, and for this reason Meek’s Cutoff circumvents the fictitious retro-feel nostalgia that too many latter-day westerns fall into. Meek’s Cutoff is as urgently contemporary (and as urgently local) as Reichardt’s previous film, Wendy and Lucy (2008), was: the Oregon depicted in both films constitutes a being-lost-in-the-present which is timeless and indelible. Meek’s Cutoff is undoubtedly Reichardt’s greatest achievement yet, and as an exercise in the western genre, it offers the wide-screen spaciousness and cinematographic richness that all orthodox westerns are known for. But what makes Meek’s Cutoff truly original is its rigorous use of atmosphere: its sonic absorption of environmental pressures and aleatory forces produces passages which hint at but never fully reach a kind of hermetic enlightenment.

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7. The Kid with a Bike — dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Belgium/France)

6. The Mill and the Cross — dir. Lech Majewski (Poland/Sweden)

Brueghel’s famous sense of motility — multitudinous, boundless and scattered — is brought to rapturous life by Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross, one of the finest films on art to have been produced in recent memory. One is reminded of Peter Greenaway’s oeuvre, particularly Nightwatching (2007), a dramatic recreation of the historical forces that worked for and against the completion of Rembrandt’s “The Nightwatch” (1642); but Majewski’s work avoids Greenaway’s theatricality and licentious asides by immersing itself within the pictorial fabric of Brueghel’s dizzyingly meticulous canvas. Much like in Auden’s poem on Brueghel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” the historical/mythical subject has been replenished by its delimitation: its off-screen, minor placement allows for the plurality of life to flower around its small puncture-point. Icarus, much like Christ — titular subjects of their respective paintings — are no longer the overbearing, overdetermined despots of subject-object relations; rather, they serve as Archimedean vanishing points from which, and through which, the sentient world is allowed to breathe, to move, to come to vivid life. Majewski’s wisdom in following Bruegel’s example, situating his film in the pictorial depths that Bruegel walked through and discoursed upon, provides us with the felicitous occasion of watching the (cinematic) frame vanish and blend into the pictorial surface.

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5. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia — dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey)

There is a hilarious scene in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Distant (2002) when Mahmut, a middle-aged, successful photographer, treats his cousin Yusuf, a laborer from the countryside temporarily staying with him, to a screening of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Yusuf, ostensibly bored by the pensive film, excuses himself and retires to his room for the night; the more worldly Mahmut, now left alone, decides to eject Tarkovsky’s masterwork and slyly pops in a porn film (clearly part of the nightly routine for a bachelor used to living alone in an Istanbul apartment), all the while anxiously glancing over to Yusuf’s bedroom door in the fear that it should open and interrupt his secret pleasure. The comedy, of course, arrives when Yusuf does open the door and Mahmut quickly changes the channel — Yusuf, now interested in the television program, hovers over Mahmut, who pretends to channel surf randomly. The scene holds a lot of meaning within the thematic context of Distant, but I find it also curiously resonant in the leaps which Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s artistic career has taken. The disjunction, or should we say the distance, that divides the greatness of a film like Tarkovsky’s Stalker (or any of the immortal Russian’s films for that matter) from the lowness of the common porn film is about as immeasurable as Dante’s Paradiso was from the Inferno (Lars von Trier, another Tarkovsky acolyte, has frequently tried to bridge the two levels, the spiritual and the base, in several of his films). Ceylan’s humorous appropriation of Tarkovsky performed two functions: it brilliantly conveyed the vast gulf which separates the impenetrable formalism of great and timeless art from the contingencies and trivial demands of modern life (particularly, in Ceylan’s estimation, the kind of life lived in Istanbul or any other cosmopolitan city sunk into the disaffections of postmodernity); but the scene also projected, perhaps subconsciously, Ceylan’s evident aspirations to commit himself to an art worthy of Tarkovksy, a cinema, moreover, made profoundly difficult by the insuperable ordinaryness of situations.

4. Mysteries of Lisbon — dir. Raúl Ruiz (Portugal/France)

3. A Separation — dir. Asghar Farhadi (Iran)

2. Poetry — dir. Lee Chang-dong (South Korea)

1. The Turin Horse — dir. Bela Tarr (Hungary)

2011 was a fertile year for festival films, especially for well-established and world-renowned auteurs, a few of whom happened to produce some of their most vital work. Some interesting parallels arose: ruminations on the origin(s) of life contrasted with visions of an apocalyptic nature. The end of the world turned out to be an occasion to reflect back on its beginning. Other films were almost wholly involved in the different valences of the surface, either as an apparition of speed and tactility, or as an asylum from the immanent and consternating depths of the past. As usual, there are a number of films that won’t appear on our list simply because they were unavailable or were not released in time. But we are confident that we have selected among the very best; in fact, there were so many films that we loved, we had to expand the list to 20 entries (from last year’s 10). So, without further ado, here is the first part of Hydra Magazine’s Top 20 Best Films of 2011 (for Part Two, click here):

Reduced to its fundamental parts (a preternaturally sadistic prince abuses and terrorizes his subjects at his every whim, so a group of 13 samurai are secretly gathered in a conspiracy to kill/stop him at any cost), the plot goes no farther than “good guys go after the bad guy” — but this is precisely the reason why 13 Assassins works so well: it wastes no time to get to the meat of the action, of which the centerpiece is the 40+ minute final battle scene in which the 13 samurai take on an army of 130 soldiers. Part of the pleasure of the film is in discovering how the 13 manage to level their odds: where Seven Samurai quite famously developed engaging storylines by involving the villagers in the operation of the makeshift battle fortress they construct alongside their samurai protectors, Miike and his screenwriters, perhaps sensing their inability to recreate such a highly inimitable plot structure, choose to forgo too much exposition and dive right into the visual surprise of trick-shot battle tactics (but this is probably more due to the inherent design of Kaneo Ikegami’s original screenplay). A young boy’s fever dream undoubtedly, but one whose execution puts to shame the current stock of action and superhero films that are being made with three times the budget in Hollywood now (that said, there was probably no better pure summer action film than this one in 2011).

19. The Strange Case of Angelica – dir. Manoel de Oliveira (Portugal)
Manoel de Oliveira, as has been abundantly remarked upon, is still making films at the tender age of 103. Not only has he managed to continue working steadily since directing his first film in 1927, he has been producing films at a rapid pace. The Strange Case of Angelica, following quickly on the heels of its companion piece, Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (2009), only confirms the suspicion that Oliveira won’t be quitting anytime soon. Angelica is filled with a literary allusiveness that saturates its many frames and interiors. Beginning with a quotation from Antero de Quental and propelled by the verse of José Régio, the film covers a wide expanse of literary-historical landscape: it feels both antique and contemporary at the same time, like a 19th century short story furnished with the techno-aesthetic novelties of the early 20th. Angelica centers itself around the reanimating wonders of photographic art, but its fable concerns itself with the encroachment of the cinematic on a chimerical world divided into a series of rooms, frames, and landscapes. Interiors in Oliveira’s film seem to denote an artificiality made resplendent only through controlled light and photography, balanced on the other hand by the naturalistic landscapes of plein air scenery (most notably in several passages when the photographer, a young man named Issac [played by Ricardo Trepa], shoots pictures of day laborers singing and working on a hillside farm). If some feel that the film’s peculiar pacing carries an artificial dryness bordering on the unreal and the corny, I would answer that its strangeness relies precisely on this dryness and artificiality which Oliveira meticulously builds up frame by frame — Angelica‘s atmosphere of muted washed-out colors, anachronistic knick-knacks, and old portraiture only makes necessary the odd Méliès-style special effects that suddenly, but tastefully, lift the two dream lovers into the ether of early cinema.

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In contrast, the Claire section is impressively subtle and affective. Gainsbourg does an excellent job bringing real pathos to her performance. Though we are meant to be critical of Claire, who wants only to sit on the terrace with a nice glass of wine and what’s left of her family—(and they will have a little Beethoven playing in the background as they go!)—her sincerity, as empty as it is, is itself moving. As is the care she takes in selecting the perfect piece of chocolate for Justine, the person least likely to care, and the arrangement of the flowers by her bedside, and her futile attempts to take her young son somewhere, anywhere, as the world ends. She loads him into the golf cart and drives—fast—towards what? It doesn’t matter, but she needs to feel as if there’s a point to the driving. As she scurries around like an insect about to drown in a deluge, Justine looks on with digust. Now it is Justine who is the villain, not the planet careening through space to destroy our own. And through this, the ending offers a splinter of comfort. Justine, the ultimate nihilist, nevertheless offers something that is the closest thing to a revaluation of ritual that we will get out of von Trier. We will go on building our magic caves.

– Anelise Chen

Before the violent turning point, the anonymous “driver” or “kid” played brilliantly by Ryan Gosling suffers through at least half an hour of emotional awakening, stirred from the solipsistic confines of his shiny, enclosed vehicle, to the outwards overflowing of love for his too cute neighbor, Irene (Carey Mulligan), and his growing affection for her young son. I’ve already followed this propulsive narrative in terms of the stunningly beautiful synth-pop soundtrack, which sonically provokes  the cosmic expansion of the driver’s emotional sphere from an enclosed world of solipsism, but something is left to be said of director Nicolas Winding Refn’s play with themes of the human and machine, mechanical labor and violence, love and war. After all, the driver is a mechanic by day, a stunt devil during the fringes of his workday, and an amazingly expert get-away driver mercenary in the dark hours of the neon-lit night. His dawning love interest doesn’t so much pull him away from mechanical labor as transform his nuanced precision into even more incredible feats, expressed in what could count as heroic or even superhuman acts of violence, on the level of wars waged in epic romance, against those who threaten what’s gathered into his emotional sphere or resonance. But back to the soundtrack, you can now listen to two hours worth of Johnny Jewel’s unused tunes for an “imaginary film.”