Kino Fist. Work.

The latest print edition of Kino Fist is out, and infinite thØught indexes a handful of pieces online.

In her essay on Le Sang de bêtes, Emmy Hennings quotes director Georges Franju: "I didn't make this film because I was particularly interested in the subject of slaughterhouses but because the Vaurigard and La Villette slaughterhouses are circled by the Ourcq Canal, and by what were the Porte de Vanves vacant lots. So in other words, the location of the slaughterhouses allowed me not just to document them, but to make a documentary film."

Updated through 6/9.

"Blue Collar, made in 1978, is colour-blind in a way that is inconceivable in contemporary cinema," writes Carl Neville, after noting: "While Springsteen and Mellencamp on the radio might address your fears and sell you the Capraesque romance of the small man against the mighty Corporation, the dream of escape, the open highway, 'Thunder road,' the only Promised Land that the working stiffs in Blue Collar are going to case is the local Union Office and its ungaurded safe. No-one is going anywhere here and there is only one real concern, money, and the desperate need for more of it."

"Godard's own estimation of his Dziga Vertov group is uncannily close to the very framework and terminology employed by Rancière," notes Alberto Toscano in a piece that considers the period that begins with La Chinoise and closes with Tout va bien. "As he and Gorin remark about Letter to Jane: 'This is an aesthetic, this is a movie dealing with aesthetics understood as a category of politics....'"

"Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is a critical essay on the corrosive nature of 'work' - specifically, the invisible work performed by women," writes Dave McDougall, who then elaborates on the film's "two major conceptual frameworks for 'work' that contrast with the cusp-of-'68, Maoism-inflected works of Jean-Luc Godard."

"If in the early days of Hollywood (and of film) it was still possible to depict the production process in all its misery, it is because the industrialization of labour, and the ideological mystery-making machinery of global capitalism, was itself less sophisticated, its reach further from total," writes Boris Knezevic. "As the production process disappears from the view of consumers in the West, its disappearance is 'recorded' on film, indexed by its absence."

Updates, 6/9: Owen Hatherley presents a "Short History of the Refusal of Work as a Revolutionary Strategy" and, as noted earlier, infinite thØught on Marin Karmitz's 1972 Coup pour Coup (Blow for Blow).

Posted by dwhudson at June 8, 2008 4:23 AM