jesse jones

Against the Realm of the Absolute | Jesse Jones| June 2011 |

2 Against the Realm of the Absolute | Jesse Jones

The Megaphone ChoirJasmine Bray Triance describes her experience as a workshop contributor and member of the Megaphone Choir.

A production almost entirely shaped by women. Is this radical?

I expected the negative tone of the voice within me to have dis-appeared but yet it spoke out like a disapproving parent remind-ing me of the unthinkable things I was about to get myself into. Models of hierarchy and conserva-tiveness continue to make women question the nature of feminism. To distinguish your feminism is hard to determine without the in-fluence of other women and with-out looking to how feminism has been represented historically. Workshops, set up prior to rehearsals for the film, elicited dialogue about films directed by women. Of all the films, Lizzie Borden’s 1983 Born In Flames impressed me the most. The science fiction documentary set in New York follows the development of a women’s army and their attempt to overthrow a male dominant so-ciety responsible for sexism, racism and unemployment. Everyone at the screening thought that the film was a dated and comic vision of the future. Jesse Jones mentioned that Borden’s intentions for the film were incred-ibly serious. If the characters were not women but stereotypical terror-ists, the film would instantly become a more serious prediction of modern day events. I would suggest that the film represents the potential women have to be clandestine, much in the way any extremist would be, if not more so, by hiding behind the labels that suppress women. The end of the film is fast-paced and the wom-en seem to take control too easily. In all the films screened, women were the subjects of oppositeness. Good. Evil. Women. Men. Rich. Poor. Chaos. Order. These opposing terms are instinctively ordered into a hierarchy. Perhaps then it is the ten-dency of women, in the rejection of

male domination, to condemn other things that are essentially male domi-nated, completely inverting the dual-istic relationship of men and women.

But what if this relationship was not just inverted but halved? What if men ceased to exist? And with them, conflict?

Jesse Jones’s film explores one re-sulting possibility. Against the Realm of the Absolute explores a distant future populated by women, far be-yond capitalism and the existence of men (having died of a sex-specific disease). The downfall of capital-ism is still celebrated in a ritual per-formed by women in a grey dystopia. Intertwined with the ritual are mul-tiple narratives of feminism and pro-test, referencing other science fiction works as well as real protests of the recent past. One example is the ap-propriated text of J K Gibson-Gra-hams’ The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It). Alongside seven other women, I performed this text in a Megaphone Choir. Like any choir, we were unified not just in voice, but in the embodiment of the text, bringing power and life to it. The megaphone is a gesture of protest today, but in this future it is used as a formal tool to evoke remembrance. It isn’t used to direct a message towards anyone, which I imagine, might make the per-formance look hollow to the viewer. As well as a Megaphone Choir with no audience, the use of mirrors in the film to fracture the image of the women and reflect the dystopic envi-ronment, could be viewed as a sym-bolic shift in dualistic relationships. In this future there is no culture and no other. The relationships that have defined humanity throughout time and the dualistic philosophy we use to interpret the world has gone astray - and with it passion? Perhaps the purpose of the film is to take a radical view to demonstrate a caution - as is customary in previous narratives of dystopia - against such possibilities growing from within to-day’s social and economic systems.

Is this a responsibility we must ad-here to within the contemporary arts?

|

|

|

|

|

|

The Day After The World Never Ended aka Jesse Jones Meets The Creatures From The Ash Lagoon. Neil Cooper's diary of the film shoot.

It is the morning after the day the world never ended, and everything feels fine. With the much vaunted Rapture of 18.00 hours Greenwich Meantime on Saturday May 21st 2011 having passed without incident and apparently revised for October 21st later this year, it's a windy and rainy Sunday morning in Edinburgh. Collective, too, is a hive of activ-ity equally of its own making. Two sets of placards lean against the wall while a woman in tracksuit bottoms and an orange hoodie polishes down several large silver coloured triangles so swishly that you can see your face in them. Which, as it turns out, is the point.

Slowly but steadily a stream of wom-en arrive at the gallery, all dressed down in utilitarian shades of grey. As the women collect up placards, painted grey and emblazoned with an image of a nail-varnished female hand wrapped round a penis, one can't help but think of the all-female protests at Greenham Common and Faslane nuclear bases in the 1980s. As it is, while the urgency of a real life protest-in-waiting charges the air, the day out that is to follow o!ers a very di!erent proposition.

Jesse Jones is the Dublin-based art-ist and film-maker who for the last ten months has been researching Against the Realm of the Absolute, a new film-based project for the Col-lective, set to be screened June and

July 2011. Today will bring the most labour intensive part of it to a close via a very special day trip, to film the final and most crucial three scenes for the ten-minute post-apocalyptic feminist science-fiction film.

Inspired by The Female Man, a novel by separatist feminist science-fiction writer Joanna Russ, written in 1970 and first published in 1975, Against the Realm of the Absolute sets itself in what Jones calls 'the superfuture' of 2031 when men have been wiped out and capitalism has ended. By setting up a series of 'future histori-cal re-enactments', Jones attempts to merge feminist theory with sci-fi, a genre normally the preserve of geeky boys and sexless sociopathic men. Russ, however, was an iconoclastic and radical figure, whose death in April 2011 suggests that Jones might just have picked up the torch for a new generation.

Against the Realm of the Absolute draws inspiration too from a series of weekly screenings at Edinburgh’s Filmguild Cinema of seminal but little-known feature films made by women. With post-screening dis-cussions led by Jones, the series kicked o! with another rad-fem sci-fi flick, Born In Flames, made by Lizzie Borden in 1983. This was fol-lowed by Maeve, Pat Murphy and John Davies' 1981 view of the Irish Troubles from a female perspective, and other works by Yvonne Rainer, Chantal Akerman, Jane Arden and Maya Deren. The cast of Jones' film is drawn from those who attended these screenings. Jones also refer-ences Brecht, Meyerhold and Busby Berkeley, as well as Jerzy Skolimows-ki's 1978 film, The Shout. Adapted from a Robert Graves short story, The Shout tells of a strange drifter played by Alan Bates, who claims to have been taught an unholy guttural

Against the Realm of the Absolute | Workshops | April 2011 Against the Realm of the Absolute | Production shot | May 2011

3Against the Realm of the Absolute | Jesse Jones

cry by an Aboriginal shaman pos-sessed with the power to kill. To the experimental composer played by John Hurt, this proves a fascinating proposition.

By a strange quirk of serendipity that also marks the demise of Joanna Russ, The Shout, alongside Skoli-mowski's earlier film, Deep End, will show during the run of Against the Realm of the Absolute on June 26th at Edinburgh International Film Festival 2011 as part of a mini retrospective of Skolimowski works. Against the Realm of the Absolute will be screened alongside a perfor-mance by the Megaphone Choir at Teviot Row House as part of Edin-burgh International Film Festival the day before. Coincidence? Or is something bigger happening here?

For Jones' purposes the ash-logged scenes found on the Scottish east coast must become a bleak and barren desert of future-shocked dystopia, where political and ar-tistic theory can be transformed into equally provocative action. The three final set-ups being filmed today, Jones says, are one with all the women holding aloft the plac-ards with the penis and the hand, a stylised group shot of the women throwing stones in formation à la Meyerhold, and, finally, the long-awaited Megaphone Choir, in which the women will be filmed from above while striking a Busby Berkeley-style collective pose and declaiming in unison the text that appears on the other placards on board.

This text, referring to a 'straw man' is taken from The End of Capital-ism (As We Knew It), the 1996 tome published under the name of J K Gibson-Graham, the collectively (that word again) constructed pen name of feminist economic geogra-phers Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson. The use of the megaphones for such a united action relates to The Shout, Jones says, and is a form of re-enactment as an absurdist gesture.

With such an emphasis on the social, the collective and the participatory, Jones' work is a form of protest by stealth. Or, as Jones herself puts it, protest as a way of reigniting a belief system.

The wind is up beneath the pylons on location, so everyone huddles into the mini-buses to watch the rushes of yesterday's filming on Kate's lap-top, while devouring an indoor pic-nic of sandwiches and doughnuts. Everything Jones has said so far is made clear whilst watching the

rushes, including the use of grey cos-tumes on the grey landscape. The footage is silent, and the ratio of the screen isn't right, so the Mirroresses are distorted even more as their bod-ies bleed into abstract shapes on the big silver triangles - especially as they shimmer ever so slightly in the wind.

‘Does it look like how it felt?’, asks Kate. ‘Noooo!’, comes the collective reply.

By the time lunch has finished and everybody has signed in, Ash has arrived with Jill. Ash realises she's wearing di!erent glasses than she was the day before, and there are worries over continuity. At the end of the day, though, one more Brechtian device can't do any harm.

Still in the car park, Fiona leads eve-ryone through a physical and vocal warm-up before the Megaphone Choir line-up in a row with their megaphones to run through the day's far-o! final sequence. After a few false starts, the rehearsal becomes increasingly and impressively tight as the Choir tap into each other’s rhythm. After a quick head-count, everyone piles into the mini-bus and heads for the first location, which is the one with dunes of ash, like a 1974 Doctor Who set. The central bank of ash at the centre of one of the ridges isn't as dark as the others either side of it.

The wind is pretty unrelenting and surgical style masks and goggles are handed out lest ash blows into eyes, noses and throats. If you wear a hat and a hood while sporting such ac-coutrements, your reflection in the mini-bus mirror vaguely resembles some early 1990s novelty rave act.

Nevertheless, Tessa, Tess, Jas, Gio, Fiona, Ash and Geraldine keep their masks and goggles on as they rehearse the stone-throwing in what is essentially a piece of slow-motion classicist choreography overseen by Jones, who gives the group vocal sig-nals for each move as a quarterback would on an American football team.

Jones directs from the bottom of the ridge using one of the megaphones to speak over the wind, tweaking each performer into positions that give the whole image dimension and depth. The wind is blowing in earnest now, and during one of the rehearsals Tess is nearly blown from the top of the ridge as a gust catches her raised placard and almost brings her back down to earth. Everyone works out a way of spinning the plac-ards around that will avoid this. Once Tess is moved to what is the front of a carefully aligned three rows,

however, it doesn't stop ash blowing into her eyes, causing another hold-up. Up until now the group have been going through their motions with coats, masks and goggles on. In a moment, though, the light will be just so, and once they take o! their layers so there's only grey on grey, every-thing changes. With the cameras roll-ing, each performer turns their plac-ard, with Gio and Tess at the front raising them high. Suddenly they look united, like some out of time ar-rangement of Ann Lee's Shakers or dressed-down su!ragettes holding a silent vigil.

If One Plus One was Godard at his most didactic, by 1972's Tous va Bien, starring Yves Montand and Jane Fonda, he was questioning the very nature of love, revolution and film itself. It is from Tous va Bien that Jones chose the image of the penis cradled by a female hand that adorns the placards in Against the Realm of the Absolute.

There's something in Jones' work too of the guerilla tactics employed by Derek Jarman in his 1987 film The Last of England, a poetic meditation on life in Thatcher's Britain in which at one point a big-frocked and wind-swept Tilda Swinton cavorts on the beach in a manner not unlike some of Jones' actors. An associate pro-ducer and contributor to the sound-track of Jarman's film, incidentally, was Mayo Thompson, who as leader of the band The Red Krayola has been a long-term collaborator with the Marxist-inspired conceptual art troupe Art & Language. It was The Red Krayola too who provided the ti-tle song for Born In Flames, as sung by Lora Logic backed by Thompson and a band recruited from the late 1970s stable of Rough Trade Re-cords, including bassist Gina Birch of all-female band The Raincoats.

Moving back to the previous loca-tion where some flat land sits beside the dunes, Jones directs the group rehearsing the stone sequence some more, running the group through their paces as a trainer would with a decathlon team. Jones runs them through the sequence of movements again and again until, even with their coats and masks back on, they're perfectly in synch, mirroring each other's actions yet retaining their individual physical tics at the same time.

Once the camera is rolling, with Jones kneeling on the ash, hood up, watch-ing the action through a monitor, again, the show of strength on display both on camera and o! is un-nerving. With most of the group taking shelter

in the mini-bus before moving on to the second location, DOP Kate and camera assistant Eanna film a close-up of Tessa, who sports what looks like a grey snood on her head, giving her the air of Tess of the d'Urbervilles (if Thomas Hardy's novel had been set down a coal mine). As it turns out, the snood turns out to be a skirt, and Tessa was actually named after Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

The convoy, now with the additions of the cherry-picker, makes its way to the second location. That's not before the security guard retriev-

ing Jones' ash-covered pass tells her he's never seen such a dirty woman. In truth, though, she's not alone, as Tessa, Tess, Ash and Gio clean out the insides of their ears with toilet roll. In keeping with the science-fiction theme, the Mega-phone Choir, it seems, really are the creatures from the ash lagoon. Fiona leads the group through a warm-up that finds the Megaphone Choir humming in unison in a real life chorale that's only slightly hyster-ical from all the exposure to the ele-ments over the preceding six hours. It's decided that Tessa should now be

Against the Realm of the Absolute | Production shot | April 2011


Against the Realm of the Absolute | Production shot | May 2011


fi lmed performing the text solo, and, once she's swapped her screechy megaphone, delivers it with such vi-brant intensity that it sounds like the call to arms it was undoubtedly in-tended to be.

Now it's 9.12pm, the sun is almost down and everyone is jumping on the spot to stay warm. It's like a parade, laughs Jones, as she kneels astride the fl at of the cherry-picker with the monitor in front of her. Sure enough, with the Megaphone Choir surrounding the truck below her, Jones might well be the May Queen holding court over her sub-jects while aboard some festive fl oat. Who says revolution can't be fun?It's 10pm now, and from a distance the Choir look like they're shim-mying some spontaneous routine that might have been devised not so much by Busby Berkeley, as by Pan's People having just landed on the moon. Finally, Kate and Eanna are up on the deck of the elevat-ed cherry-picker ready to roll, the light is casting gorgeous silhou-ettes onto camera and suddenly it's a take, the Megaphone Choir are o! , sounding strident and un-breakable and invincible once more. Jones is pushing it now with more cutaways and close-ups. Given the fi lm's subject matter, there's a won-derfully unintentional irony in how she refers to her all-female cast as 'lads'. ‘Okay, lads, one more shot, just one more shot, lads, that's great, lads’, as Kate and Eanna pan slowly round the Choir in formation. Then, one fi nal silhouette of Geraldine in the can for the lads, and, at 10.18pm, it's a wrap.

The light may be gone, but the strug-gle goes on. The world hasn't ended yet.

|

|

|

|

|

Replicating Irrational Exuberance [1] Isla Leaver-Yap responds to speculation within Science Fiction and how it relates to political narratives.

To follow Star Trek as symptomatic of American foreign policy is a fairly straightforward task. One need only glance at the franchise in terms of its television series: the original series from the 1960s is marked by a fron-tierism and is infl ected with a unsub-tle dose of Cold War politics, where captain and crew went out to fi nd new worlds as one might real estate [2] ; The Next Generation’s empha-sis on intergalactic diplomacy and unilateral peacekeeping was broad-cast against the backdrop of warming relations between the United States and foreign allies; while the perpetu-ally lost Voyager and the exploits of its captain Janeway ends, interestingly, at the beginning of George W Bush’s presidency [3]. With the exception of the frontierism of the original se-ries (which made reference to the United Federation of Planets as if it were only speaking of the US), Star Trek is generally marked by a mood of post-capitalist federalism, which is to say a demonetised system of interplanetary alliances that loosely resembled the United Nations. And the distillation of this latter mood? The replicator.

A machine able to create food, ox-ygen, tools and equipment, even spare human body parts, the repli-cator conveniently appears to elimi-nate the future problem of scarcity economics. The television series’ utopian vision of a moneyless soci-ety is supported solely by this ma-chine, which produces ‘free goods’ and serves one’s unending needs and wants. With the replicator, then, human needs/wants occur not out of the appetite for rarity or ‘incen-tivised’ by the fl uctuation of market forces, but the issue of needs/wants is instead generated and moderated by the individual user, who relies on their own common sense to under-stand what desire should be satis-fi ed. The replicator, then, is not only a producer of goods, but also a pro-ducer of one’s moral sense of need over want, since the latter has been eradicated [4].

The replicator fi rst appeared in Star Trek: The Next Generation [5], a se-ries fi rst aired in 1987, and inciden-tally (or not) coincides with America and Canada’s historic ratifi cation of

the fi rst Free Trade Agreement, the Black Monday Wall Street crash, Pe-restroika, and the fi rst laying of optic fi bre communication cables across the Atlantic. Most signifi cantly, how-ever, the replicator featured as a regular component of the television series throughout the concurrent rise of the Clinton administration. Thus the imagination for and Star Trek’s continued development of the replicator emerges from a highly spe-cifi c form of thinking: namely, the ‘new era’ desire to produce infi nite surplus.

The 1990s ushered in the grow-ing economic prowess of America, and the burgeoning technological economy of Silicone Valley cannot be ignored in this regard. While the Star Trek replicator appeared on television week in and out to trans-form leftover food into fake caviar and lungs, the Clinton administra-tion produced the longest boom in US history, orchestrated in close col-laboration with Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. This was the new era economy that had not only expanded by 50%, but also generated enough gross nation-al product to comprise a quarter of the world’s economic output with a staggering budget surplus of $237 billion. As a consequence of the de-regulation of the markets and the ex-plosion of the internet, Greenspan’s initial concern that market growth was an ‘irrational exuberance’ (as it failed to create an increase in pro-ductivity) was hastily retracted. He attempted to ameliorate the dip in the markets by generating a self-correcting excuse that the newly net-worked market had ‘invented’ new forms of productivity so complex and di! use that he couldn’t account for (or, more precisely, detect) their growth implications [6]. Just as the replicator produces a subject who can respond with self-regulated ra-tional desires, so Greenspan spoke of a market that would self-regulate through computerised calculated risk-taking. Both would produce a surfeit of reproducible product; both were di! erent forms of science fi ction.

The replicator, of course, is not the fi rst instance of a machine capable of material repeatability. Perhaps the earliest mention of self-replicating machines comes with Karel "apek's play RUR (Rossum's Universal Ro-bots) from 1921, while Primo Levi’s short story Order on the Cheap in-troduced a duplicating machine ca-pable of creating order from disor-der in 1966, and the ‘Santa Clause Machine’ surfaced as a debateable future in the 1970s. The earliest

example, however, may indeed be the Cornucopia, a horn of the goat Amaltheia that constantly refi lled with food and drink. In each in-stance, the notion of a post-labour economy is presented as Thomas Moore’s utopia, though the mystical action of regeneration is reserved ex-clusively to that of mechanical tech-nology by the 20th-century.

But let’s look again at the promise of the replicator: infi nite surplus. This is an uncomfortable post-capitalism, since capitalism specifi cally seeks out surplus. Infi nite surplus is im-measurable, unaccountable, without season, produced without labour and

thus without time. It collapses wants and needs into desire and thus seeks to establish a value that is ethical, not merely quantifi able. But this is not an entirely free economy; the replica-tor is itself a property of the Starfl eet. The production of ethics and prod-ucts always has its regulator.

|

|

|

Against the Realm of the Absolute | Workshops | March 2011

Flag of the United Federation of Planets

The Replicator

Flag of the United Nations


[1] This essay is indebted to conversa-tions with artist Danna Vajda, whose project Holodeck and Other Spaces, a collaboration with Willie Brisco, informed the arguments herein. [2] Despite the series’ creator Gene Rodenberry insisting on the original Star Trek as a utopian imagining of global politics, the peaceful agenda of Star Trek’s Prime Directive (of non-violence and non-interference) is repeatedly ignored by the origi-nal series’ Captain Kirk, in favour of more aggressive confrontations with alien. Further, one cannot fail to no-tice the Klingons resemblance to a pantomime idea of a Mongol Horde, a species who stand in opposition to the ‘good sense’ of the Federation. [3] The frontierism of the initial Star Trek series was not entirely subdued in the later series. It is not by accident, for example, that Benjamin Sisko referred to Deep Space 9 as ‘the most important piece of real estate in the Alpha Quadrant’, a thinly veiled attempt to convince his superiors to per-mit an aggressive military o!ensive. [4] In contrast to the characteris-tic philosophical rationale of mas-ter tactician Captain Jean Luc Pic-ard, the captain nonetheless undoes the replicator’s supposed eradica-tion scarcity, by keeping a stash of ‘real’ caviar for special occasions. [5] When thinking of the replicator at large, it’s interesting to consider that despite its long format and dra-ma genre, Next Generation was sur-prisingly successful in finding first-run syndication, and ran across a variety of networks that could insert advertising at their own choosing. This was in opposition to the deficit-financing model of single network loyalty. Next Generation remains one of the successfully syndicat-ed shows in US television history. [6] Adam Curtis’ recent documen-tary series All Watched Over by Ma-chines of Loving Grace, 2011, BBC, describes Greenspan’s warning and retraction as a key moment for the growth of deregulation that allowed hedging to become commonplace and widely accepted as a form of bal-ancing the markets.

|

|

|

|

|

|

On Delinquency…Jesse Jones.

Social action and the participation in our political reality in which we inscribe with ideas of agency and power often imply some sense of necessary action, an active dissent that may manifest gestures of pro-test or disrupt processes of capital-ism. We may also think about our delinquency to the script of capital, the possibility of defaulting to our prescribed role within the economic structures that have been imposed upon us. Ireland’s current economic collapse has seen our entire political establishment bow to the demands of the International Monetary Fund, with a bailout plan that is set to lead the country into a decade of auster-ity, in which the vast majority of citi-zens are set to carry the burden of debt for farcical financial speculation of an elite few over the past decade. But what are the possibilities of our defaulting or becoming delinquent to this imposed economic narrative? In our delinquency can we liberate ourselves not only from this crippling financial strain, mass unemployment and emigration, but also through a movement of delinquency, create space for new realms of perception that allow us to experience the politi-cal in an entirely di!erent way?

Jacque Ranciere, in his text The Politics of Aesthetics, described the social narrative in which we exist as ‘The distribution of the sensible’, meaning, ‘the implicit law governing the sensible order that parcels out places and forms of participation in a common world by first establish-ing the modes of perception within which these are inscribed. The distri-bution of the sensible thus produces a system of self-evident facts of per-ception based on the set of horizons and modalities of what is visible and audible as well as what can be said, thought, made or done. Distribution therefore refers to both forms of in-clusion and forms of exclusion. The sensible of course does not refer to what shows good sense or judgement but to what is capable of being ap-prehended by the senses’.

What Ranciere highlights is that in order to re-draw these aesthetic boundaries and create new territo-ries of perception, we must first ac-quire the power to disseminate and distribute that new visual and senso-ry experience. This counter-aesthet-ic world can forge a strong dissenting force to the dominant distribution of

the sensible. This deliberate will of non-compliance to the aesthetic or-der of things occurs at various points in our cultural history and has vast repercussions to the seeding of pos-sible modes of reality that might ensue.

In 1950s America, during moder-nity's perceived highest point of distribution, an aesthetic evolved from a generation of post-war teen-agers. They defined a distinct cul-tural experience that was uniquely their own, through a delinquency to the ideals and morals of their par-ent’s generation. The boom period in the American economy led to an increase in the number of teens who had access to allowances from parents whom, having lived through almost a decade of war and rations, were eager to dote on their children. Mass suburbanization and fetish-ism of the household in mass media and advertising led to an increased privatisation of family space to the domain of the home. Concurrently a surplus in income began allowanc-es for teenagers, from which a new consumer economy emerged. The record industry and these teens now had the spending power to define a consumer culture of their own.

Jukebox venders and radio sta-tions soon bent to the taste of this emergent generation as Alan Freed coined the term, rock and roll, a music which vented narratives of sexual curiosities and interracial cultural possibilities at a time when the American school system was still segregated.

The culture of delinquency was soon defined equally as a menace to the social order by reactionary figures such as J Edgar Hoover, who warned of juvenile delinquency and exces-sive crime. Alarmists such as Fredric

Wertham warned of the corrupting e!ects of violence in comic books and other popular forms of youth culture in his study, The Seduction of the Innocent from 1954. The sensory world created by the 1950s teenager ushered in the aesthetic culture of the ‘Beat Generation’. A culture that was entirely new and es-tranged from their parents’ realm of perception.

These teenagers had their own mu-sic, cinema, even language, opening a vast schism between themselves and their parents’ generation. This gap allowed for a space of imagina-tion to emerge, that things could be otherwise. That a delinquency to the distribution of the sensible may be possible. This schism would become the fertile ground on which a coun-tercultural movement of the later 1960s would sow its seeds of resist-ance. The rebellion against parental figures soon extended to a rebellion against patriarchy itself, and would become part of a mass movement to transform society. The roots to this counterculture were formed in the screen images of the 50s teen delin-quent manifest in Nicolas Ray’s Re-bel Without A Cause, made in 1955. Rebel... critiques the most elemental facet of the ruling order of reality in 1950s America, the family. Seeing it not as a moral, wholesome and sta-ble force, but rather, as a dark cor-rupting institution, one in which sin-ister Oedipal tendencies, alienation and victimisation are at play. At the heart of this is the hero Jim’s (played by James Dean) failure to find an adequate father figure or symbol of authority. He is set to the task of forming an alternate world, an au-tonomous space of his own in which he can exist separately to ‘their’ rules and laws of the sensible. However, a fundamental conservatism ex-ists within the rebellion. Jim wants

Against the Realm of the Absolute | Workshops | March 2011


to be emancipated through his own enforcement of masculine strength. His rebellion sees him create an al-ternative pseudo-family world, high in the hills in the abandoned man-sion of a former Hollywood star. The mansion is repossessed by the char-acters Plato, Jim and Judy, for whom paternal abandonment is the main psychological compulsion feeding their resistance.

François Tru!aut said at the time of Dean’s iconography, ‘In James Dean, today’s youth discovers itself through the eternal adolescent love of tests, trials, intoxication, pride and regret at feeling outside society, refusal and desire to become integrated and fi-nally, acceptance or refusal of the world as it is.’

Two years previously, Laszilo Bened-eks’s The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando as part of a rebel motorcycle gang that terrorises a small town, of-fered a case for nomadic non-con-formity. In fact it is the small town that equally terrorises its visitors, but it is the contrast between their diver-gent modes of reality that now casts each into bas-relief. The small Amer-ican town now feels even smaller and conservative as seen through the eyes of its new and transient inhabitants. The rebels, for whom mobility is epitomized by the motorcycle itself, seem more transgressive. They are not rooted in a place, but rather it is the bond of the tribe of fellow mo-torcyclists that becomes their social definition of place. It is this trans-position of the authority of the tribe from family and institutional powers such as schools, and fundamentally the state, which most describes the power and threat of the modes of delinquency in the 1950s. This new a#liative tribe could make up their own code of order, one that did not prescribe to the roles previously re-quired of them. However, it is the role of women within the delinquen-cy narrative that is least attended to, except for the titillating B-mov-ie romps such as High School Hell Cats and Reform School Girl. The binaries of good girl / bad girl are still very much at play and no complex-ity arises that may give a divining rod to the precipices of a feminist coun-terculture that would arise in the en-suing decade. Although the men in the delinquent narrative have agency and can form tribal bonds within the group, the women cannot form these relations, they require a male care-taker to escort them through these new realms of aesthetic possibility.

In Kent MacKenzie’s film The Ex-iles, made from 1958 - 1961, we see a lone woman wander through the

desolate streets of Bunker Hill in downtown LA. Wife to a delinquent husband, for whom the endless night is his playground, she is left to watch projected fictional lives in an all-night movie house before wandering home alone. MacKenzie’s film is by far one of the most important films made in this entire period, if not the last 50 years. However, it is one of the least known. It exists on the mar-gins, a type of exile within itself.

Made on the margins of the Hol-lywood film industry, MacKenzie’s stark realism stands in contrast to the dream factory of the established studios. The Exiles follows a group of Native Americans living in the now disappeared district of Bunker Hill over 12 hours of durational, yet rapid paced documentary fiction cinema. The world of neon lights, drag races and all-night parties - stock mise en scène to the delinquent teen flick, now plays a sombre back-drop to a group of unlikely delinquents. Far from the blonde all-American Dean or the hyper-masculine caricatures of Brando, the band of delinquent chicano and Native American pro-tagonists play hookie on a world in which they have no place, economi-cally or politically. The aesthetic ter-rain of the 1950s teen with its rock and roll and jukebox jockeys with spitfire slang, become the last ref-uge of a disappearing nation within a nation.

For the delinquents in The Exiles, their non-compliance to the script of American Modernity is alas a failed poetic swan song to a community that is dissolving into the cracks of Los Angeles. For them delinquency has come too late. To be delinquent we must choose our timing well, not wait until we have already been pushed to the peripheries, but rather create the schism within the centre. It is within this centre that the rup-ture to the dominant distribution of reality is most e!ective. It is from here its repercussions will be felt. Yet delinquency is not an end in itself, it must be pursued with the inten-tion to fulfill its anti-establishment potential. The recent labeling of the economically delinquent countries in the EU such as Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain, as ‘The Pigs’, seeks to demonize our deviant eco-nomic behavior, branding us with a kind of fiscal ASBO. The possibility of our resistance to this emerging tiered European patriarchy presents us with a beginning from which to embark, a departure that through our delinquency we might forge new realms of aesthetic, political and so-cial realities that will break or de-fault from what is merely expected

of us. Like the character of Brando in The Wild One, we may answer to the question ‘What are you rebelling against?’ ... ‘What have you got?’

|

|

|

|

|

|

|

|

|

|

|

|

|

|

Future CapitalAsh Reid responds to her experiences as a workshop contributor and Mirroress.

It was early or possibly just very late, however you look at it, it was dark and the dusk dawn crosso-ver reflected nothing, only your teeth and your system you are in my at least the coal is and it’s all over my boyfriend’s jacket zzzzzzzzzz

And the others I said do they exist - ex-isting is only inside the inner space or so said Ballard by way of Barnes – oh how very. What is it that led us here? We’ve watched a bunch of films now, we know where it all went wrong. [do we] Dreams don’t happen once you’ve passed ripeness and the only road trip left is death. Lacan! you sexist pig you. A hood-ed mirror does not mean anything when there’s four of you and a hill that needs conquered by Jane and her band of penises.

S e x and

Capitalism, my friend, my enemy. A utopian chiasma of sorts, A B B A Jameson vs MT's lack of an alterna-tive. Women of the world, take ? I don’t feel like a Marxist, but then, still.

set up

They started with two I missed them but then I caught up and I feel more informed, but I didn't think about the black ____ I would contend with later

It's all in my ears.

I think I missed the best one, borne of what? Walking with tight-ly hairdried film and wait! Get out of my way, man! White suits don't equal (Scottish) pow-er! I will get up that hill run-ning in heels I know not very – oh

Women are privilege, or, females is trouble. The under // other It's easy to confuse them [ those upon a donkey of psychoanalysis, acid sing-ing free love to the real world. Ar-den, Arden! Your ladies are in plain sacks, playing with mirrors, playing out to nature look at me, man! I'm free! I'm angry! I'm still your

-oh it's funny how men like her better I guess

Anyway, it doesn't match our present experience. Except does it? Is this group therapy? What are our roles? Are you there?

ROLLING

Anyway. Interior. Jeanne was driven to it, but it was too easy a conclu-sion to male/make. I laugh, shot in the home. Jeanne, does your son really allude to Freud? very A stool was missed out once too of-ten in those kitchen settings. We are enraptured by the mundane and sssshhhhhhhhh Move on. Sync.

Another landscape, this time open, still grey, the white suits now white cars creeping into the final shot. Cut. Dust conjured up a devil in the empty lagoon and we covered our eyes with that phallus for protection.

Ho. My ears are still black.



|

Against the Realm of the Absolute | 16mm Film Still | Jesse Jones | 2011



CreditsAgainst the Realm of the Absolute was commissioned and produced by Collective. The project developed over a ten-month period and included a residency in Edinburgh. Public events, film screenings and discussions culminated in the production of a 16mm film, premiered at Collective as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2011.

Featuring : Jill Brown Katie Crook Jeanne dARK Rachel King

Tessa Lynch Tess Mitchell Ash Reid Hatt Reiss Anne-Sophie Roger Bec Sharp Jasmine Bray Triance Fiona Watt

With thanks to : Nick Aitken Neil Cooper Rosalie Doubal Fiona Jardine Isla Leaver-Yap

Production Team : Jesse Jones

Kate McCullough | DOP Eanna de Buis | Camera Assistant / Focus Pull Angus McPake | Sound Kate Gray | Collective Director Jenny Richards | Project Manager Geraldine Heaney | Production Assistant Murray Ferguson | Production Assistant Neil Ogg | Production Assistant

Supported by : Scottish Power

East Lothian Council Filmbase Ireland RuaRED Edinburgh International Film Festival Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums

Funded by : Creative Scotland Edinburgh City Council

Also screening during Against the Realm of the Absolute [Part I] 11|06|11 - 24|06|11 :

Born In Flames | Lizzie Borden | 1983 Privilege | Yvonne Rainer | 1990


jesse jones

Documents

potential women

dency of women

jesse joness film

nature of feminism

existence of men

male dominant

distant future

dualistic relationship