不要太期待世界末日

https://boxd.it/yZBr

https://www.patreon.com/comrade_yui

https://youtube.com/@comradeyui1498?si=rT-sX5MPmYyFBvA_

found this at its best when it leans hard into the harsh desynchronization of daily life within a digital world, how all the filters and streams and pixels add a thick fantastical miasma atop a stagnant modernist europe quickly sinking into the mud-soup of always-online global feudalism -- i'm less enamored with the parodic imitations of contemporary vulgarities, which will read more interesting to viewers of the future as a historical document of the 2020s but in the current moment seems to be a comedic flailing -- i have a skepticism towards the long and storied tradition of the type of left critique which values the depiction, parodying or even accelerating of the idiotic symptoms of capitalism in an 'ironic' or now 'post-ironic' aesthetic, as if acting like a bastard makes the real bastard less of one -- you just end up with two bastards.

that's far from all that radu jude is doing here, and i don't want to articulate a condemnation of this work, i think it is fundamentally successful, but i also believe there are inherent limits to such exercises. not to compare everything to godard (although we should), but he gave up on trying to keep pace with the frenzy of capitalist media in the 1960s and just went and did his own thing afterwards, often seeming more futuristic because of his disconnect from this mainstream -- here, we see jude digest the livestreams and tiktoks and zoom calls and represent them in a largely matter-of-fact naturalist way, it's the classical cinema of representation, workers leaving the lumière factory for the 21st century, showing the consequences and products of labor but not labor itself as a way of life. how can you make a parody of an economic system which already metastasizes its own contradictions and flaws into narrative entertainment? instead of revolution in our lives, we experience a critique of all values in art, and we expect the two to somehow equate to the same thing -- yet films such as do not expect too much from the end of the world almost exclusively play to the eyes of bourgeois festival goers, coastal culture aristocrats, or deranged obsessive aesthetes like myself, not to those workers who would have the most to gain from it.

we still operate under the illusion of cinema as a mass medium which has the capacity to change consciousness on a huge scale, but it's increasingly become a specialized interest in the age of digital 'content creation' -- if you're reading this review, you're looking for curation and context about cinema, not whether cinema itself means anything to you, that's already assumed. radu jude's metatextual playfulness is not totally out of step with the world as it is, ending or not -- it accommodates humor about the situation we all find ourselves trapped within, it has room for despair too. the hints of a counter-art are clearly visible within that form -- making cinema with chunky cellphone cameras and multi-media dexterity, the democracy of the image and its creator, all of that points to the future which has already arrived, we live in a rich period of aesthetic development even if it's not immediately apparent within the conservative film industry. but i'm convinced that we need to do more than just the standard left-wing thing of pointing out stuff, of trying to make a spectacle of capitalist realism, because it then takes that spectacle and sells it back to us in an even more anesthetized commodity, it doesn't care about the truth, it only cares about the ease at which images can be valued for a certain audience -- we pay the premium ticket at the film festival or buy the expensive blu-ray for the promise of an experience which will 'satisfy' in some special miraculous way, but it rarely does, it's old-school hucksterism at its finest; capitalism creates a cultish aura around cinema and the arts, and many people get caught up chasing that illusory aura rather than examining the images which are being sold to them beneath the ritualized glamour.

some images are corrupted in this way, and others are ignored entirely -- the shakey-cam videos of hamas and the PFLP being engaged in active life-or-death conflict against their colonial oppressors, storming towers and firing RPGs at armored vehicles, these have the inherent enthusiasm and zeal of a cinematic eye that wants to show direct action against the neo-imperial core of america and its western allies. yet those videos don't have loggable entries on letterboxd, only 'official' releases do -- who is officiating? the invisible bureaucratic control system lurks behind what you are encouraged to see, and it tries to suppress and trivialize that which challenges it, to make a parody of the global under-class, who rely on the immediacy and sincerity of art regardless of if it fits into the cliquish circle of western art critics.

it occurs to me that i generally don't enjoy comedies because they tend to be made from a source of general bitterness or anxiety, and that abstracted negativity alone cannot change the world, it often corroborates that which it tries to ridicule -- see how almost every hollywood film since the 90s is 'in on the joke' and makes fun of itself, yet still does what it always does anyway. do not expect too much from the end of the world lies within this bed of negative dialectic, the legacy of adorno and marcuse and zizek, fellow travelers on the left who have inspired many people today, but also whose ideas and systems nevertheless remain impotent to actually affect any meaningful change -- meanwhile, a 23 year-old palestinean who lost his entire family in years of occupation and months of constant aerial bombardment has a go-pro attached to his head while he runs up to a zionist tank and shoves an improvised grenade between its beige armored paneling. no critic is going to curate that for you, it won't win any awards, it's not ironic, it's not post-modern, it's reality -- i think art must strive to either help us access the transcendent, or to strip away the ideological layers surrounding our material existence, to divinize or to illuminate -- do not expect does plenty of the latter and shows us how we can walk further down this path -- we must have a cinema which is free of commercialized contrivance.

the uwe boll scene is 👌