HOME  |
 |
 |
|
Director's Statement
"All men dream but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was a vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible" - T.E. Lawrence.
MUFF 8 is here. The theme is a Benevolent Psychopathology. Why?
It’s an election year and most people are talking party politics in our capitalist democratic society. Talk as they might, democracy doesn’t exist when there are no real choices on the ballot. Capitalist 1 (liberal) or Capitalist 2 (labour)? One will look after the rich slightly better; the other the poor. Capitalism - the great empty mediocrity of our age - will keep us marching through the mall till we end up in that giant Ikea in the sky. Endless cultural emptiness, vast vistas of hollow consumption.
Let’s get radical… Capitalism, like Communism, does not foster the talented, unique and highest individual in a community; it is the ‘dread leveller’ as Whyndham Lewis noted when describing Communism.
English author JG Ballard (who has always been a major sign post in the cultural underground) prophesied that the only way out of this capitalist paradigm is through. In many of his mythological novels of the near future, Ballard searches for a Benevolent Psychopathology. He finds differing variants in car crash fetishism, youth killer cults, terrorism, inter-floor warfare in high rise flats and in a startlingly prescient trilogy cycle of novels from Super Cannes to Kingdom Come, has postulated dangerous variants of middle class terrorism and fascism. Ballard sees this Benevolent Psychopathology as the circuit breaker that can diffuse the capitalist paradigm and create a new kind of future.
Indeed our Arab friends know all about this as they blow themselves to smithereens all over various fronts in what is shaping up to be our age’s major epochal conflict – the “War on Terror”. They are certainly not thinking of toasters and designer furniture as they vaporise themselves to oblivion. Here is a not-so-Benevolent Psychopathology, the ultimate destructive Psychopathology that enthrals billions: Religion.
We must remember also, and list, some basic facts about the world that signpost our age’s hypocrisy: Slavery: it still exists in outsourcing and overseas sweatshops, that, for example, produce faulty toys for children to choke on. Racism: it still exists unconsciously in most Western policies and mind-set. Also, counter intuitively demonstrated by the simple fact that people feel so insulated and superior in the Western world that they deign and feign not to be racist i.e. by going to see culturally diverse uplifting films and performances as a form of rampant tokenism (see MUFF 7). Warfare, what Marinetti called “Nature’s Hygiene”, is going strong. Wars exist in pocketed conflicts around the world with particular action in Iraq and Afghanistan with further wars being promoted as coming “attractions”. Psy Warfare is omnipresent with the mood of fear and hate distilling due to the mostly fake, over-exaggerated, provoked and trumped up “war on terror” that could well have been a conspiracy like the Reichstag fire. Indeed the evidence piling up in 911 conspiracy theories is startling and ignored by Left critics like Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky.
Add to that the planet is vastly overpopulated with pollution and greenhouse gasses rapidly bringing on Armageddon on our small Gaia (if we can believe such a trivial thing as science).
But don’t think the answer to all this is liberal humanism as some would have us believe. A range of living and dead thinkers from John Gray and Leo Strauss to Robert Michels and Carl Schmitt lead an intellectual war on capitalist humanism and liberalism that is a necessary invigorating tonic. Liberal Humanism is the very mental disease that got us in this mess. Can you imagine if we brought the standard of living of the third world up to our own standards and gave every second Chinese or Indian citizen a car? This would indeed be the doom of the planet forthwith. These countries and America are the major world polluters, followed by Europe. Australia could produce no greenhouse gas tomorrow and it would make bubkiss difference to the course of world history unless these major sources of emissions are tackled. Even if our planet could sustain the maintenance of giving cars to every China man… the questions beckons…for what? The for what of our civilisation has been pure active empty materialist nihilism… best represented by the Janus faced ‘dread levellers’ capitalism and communism.
And what of peak oil and the eventual depletion of this resource? When the oil gets low, the West will keep it all and allow the Third World and Middle East (Israel excepted as it is the West’s outpost for the region) to fall fully into the dark ages (which they are half in at the moment already, despite Al Qaeda’s decidedly modern terrorist agenda resembling organised crime’s hyper capitalism. See John Gray’s book “Al Qaeda and what it means to be modern”). The US will secure the oil (as it has done in Iraq) and then that’s it –mission accomplished. Scaricity wars are the wars of the future as John Gray lucidly points out and this century will make the last look like a cake walk. Who cares what happens to the population, is the secret truth behind the Neo Cons resource wars? Remember that when you hear of Iraqi atrocities. Whatever happens, good or bad, they are expendable in capitalist-fascist mobilisation. They simply do not matter – contemplate the power and force of not caring for a moment… it is a powerful force. Allow that truth, the power of inaction and therefore willing destruction and civil wars to seep into your pores and you realise Colonel Kurtz is right around the corner with his dictum “Exterminate all the brutes”. Indeed, if things get worse in Iraq, it only means more American mobilisation, more military spending. You see the pattern, I’m sure…
There must be a better way, a new way, a pure way. Therefore, the answer to western Liberal Humanism could be a Benevolent Psychopathology.
Ballard says he doesn’t look at the Internet because he’s afraid he’ll fall in. Everyone under 40 already has “fallen” in and much besides.
But we don’t want to regress as Nietzsche notes to some Middle Ages-style ignorance with some belief in a Deity (non existent or not). We want out of this epoch and onto to the ‘new seas’. As Nietzsche says: “Never before have we stood before such a sea”. A sea that is vast rising by the science of it.
A Benevolent Psychopathology is a way out. It is an exit looked for the work of Bret Easton Ellis, Thomas Harris and other scribes of the post modern waste land. Not until people from all classes go collectively and gently mad can we be saved. The Western world needs to form elites and reconstructive groups, create new political identities that and vital and protean and can take action. The only two players on the political stage who are not ‘dread levellers’ are anarchism and fascism, a redesigned for the times mix of the two being is our sign post to the future. We need to take action to stop this capitalist entropy, (which literally sells the best of human Dasein down the drain) to stop this cipheric emptiness. Ballard’s examples of middle class terrorism and psychopathology may be extreme and dangerous … but like Heidegger says, where the danger is, also lays the saving power. Can we navigate these new seas and not make past historical errors? Ballard’s work is dangerous because it dreams the day of its factical existence, providing blue prints in novelistic form. Ballard like Vaughan is a cultural terrorist masked as a technician acting through words much as Heidegger notes, “Thinking is not inactivity, but rather it is in itself the way of acting that stands in dialogue with the destiny of the world”. Ballard helps will a benevolent psychopathology. As do we. We must risk a little craziness to break the status quo. We must not accept any “truth” or propaganda given us from mass media about recent history and political theory. We must free ourselves from the past and forge ahead to make our own history. Beat a new path acting with the old Nietzshean maxim ‘beyond good and evil’.
I believe a moderate collective insanity can free us from this historical emptiness and provide real futurist historical, political and social change. And if not we always have the nihilistic hedonism of the times to fall back on as a second option.
Ballard’s novels often feature a demented scientist or social engineer experimenting with the extremes of limit experiences. These characters are deeply fascinating and I feel a kinship to the spirit of what Ballard is trying to say with characters such as Vaughan, David Cruise, Wilder Penrose, Richard Gould and Bobby Crawford. We need to explore these areas in art and literature and come up with our own Benevolent Psychopathology in reality that will circuit break our crisis and push us boldly into rebirth through our own mythology. Indeed, a Benevolent Psychopathology maybe the only true sanity available to us.
Release the irrational! Free the id! See our program in 2007 and connect the dots. What is it behind horror and transgressive films, erotica and porn, conspiracy theories, fascinations with sex, death and body that unite all this into one incomprehensibly beautiful expression?
A benevolent psychopathology.
The actual form this will take in the future is up to us. It only needs a small band of cultural engineers and executives to steer society to where it needs to be. The perfect countries for these sociological experiments are the Scandinavian countries, The Netherlands, Australia and possibly England with also zones of opportunity opening in Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands. From there, the rest of the world can watch and imitate.
Enough already, so, what else is new?
I made a new feature, The Beautiful and Damned, which is a modern adaptation of the classic 1922 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I have been wanting to make a new feature since the completion of and festival circuit tour with Pearls Before Swine in 2001. About 4 years ago, I picked up the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel and read it. I loved it! Quickly becoming my favourite Fitzgerald and once I realized it was in the public domain, I knew that this book could become the basis for my next feature. I was looking for something contemporary to do along the lines of Bret Easton Ellis; something that reflected certain experiences running nightclubs in the 90s. The Fitzgerald novel was perfect. I became a Fitzgerald nut overnight, re-reading The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise and his masterpiece Tender is the Night plus reading The Last Tycoon and most of his short story collections. I read lit crit on Fitzgerald and found he was a Spenglerian from the mid-20s on and fan of many contemporary modernists like Eliot and Pound. So, we had a strong connection there. Fitzgerald’s prose was masterful- truly genius. No one had ever adapted him to our contemporary era before or moved him culturally and I have found most of his novels actually timeless and ripe for modern adaptation. If you do it creatively. It’s interesting to note that David Fincher recently shot Benjamin Button (based on The Curious case of Benjamin Button from Tales of the Jazz Age, the 1923 short story collection- also in the public domain). As an aside to the Fincher connection a Swedish film critic noted the similarities to Fight Club and Pearls Before Swine back at the 1999 Stockholm International Film Festival. So now we both do a Fitzgerald adaptation without the knowledge of the other doing it. The zeitgeist is never wrong. And it seems Fitzgerald is long overdue due back in our culture with the other high modernists as we face many similar problems this century as we did last. You will have to wait til next year to see the flick but I’m very happy to be ‘back in the saddle’ so to speak directing again and not just bringing you MUFF. The fact that I am a filmmaker makes MUFF different to most film festivals in this country and hopefully gives it some authenticity. A “keeping it real” ethos missing elsewhere.
So are you waiting for me to go on a rant against someone here in 2007? Well, I’m not doing that this year. I’m getting over it myself. There are two issues I could raise but who gives a fuck. Live and let live. I’m happy. I’ve made a new feature that I’m delighted with and I’m bringing you all a tres cool risque MUFF – the fest that they all said wouldn’t last. We are launching the Accent Underground DVD label that will hopefully provide a distribution outlet for many more MUFF films in the future than the ones already chosen. It feels like we have accomplished something and that we have a lot more work to do. Prometheus stand by us.
See the fest, its jam packed with great films…I can’t pick favourites…it would be the festival! Come to MUFF and entertain letting in a little complementary madness into your life!
Best Regards
Richard Wolstencroft
