These are a few quotes from hearing Hélène Cixous speak at the conference entitled Untying the Mother Tongue along with a little rant about getting into the conference hall itself.

“German is the language spoken by the hearts mouth.”

“I think she speaks in English because you can speak it anywhere, even in death.”

The eternal return.

Language is myth.

To Montaigne

“I wasn’t simply going there. I was waiting for myself, there.”

“It was a bible, a house of memory…”

“And so I return to death, always suddenly and premature.”

“I discovered my father mummified under sheets of paper… I dared to read him dead.”

“I am an archeologist of traces always impure.”

“The moment the repetition produces. The moment we return we give it power… We
learn what comes back to us.”

“It means The face that comes back to me. No. It means The face that I can bare that I love.”

“I did not lose them. They did not return. They arrived.”

“My mother tongue is religion.”

We stole our way into the conference and talk. They were not allowing more in. As if we were scum coming like rats without the correct and prompt planning capacity they clearly had squired through rigorous patience and practice. As if they could with one glance asses what had brought us to be late and that in that moment met them at the door with disdain. An intuitive move by Kendra allowed entrance to this rebel force, made of angry students, resigned and knowing professors and the like, some Berliners and some not, planning a coop of greater and greater lengths the more we were withheld from entry. We checked our plan at the door and became terrorists of opportunity. Only one counter measure was raised and caused more disturbance than any of us who entered quietly. It was a perfect moment of inappropriate action, an even more inappropriate counter, and the resolution of our arrival.

“I have it and I have only it and it is not mine.”

“Colonial wars were always coupled with internal wars.”

“I was writing without knowing it at thirteen.”

“When I write I don’t decide to use this language or that language because the language I use is writing.”

“When we need it. We the writing we use whatever language comes.”

“One does not calculate… It just comes… The voices come. They orchestrate and they play several instruments.”

“Let’s hold on to the lost.”

“There is a strange benefit in experiencing loss. It is an engagement with our mortality. We need the help of large strange forces and we do this through art.”

The salamander.

“If the translator is an artist then the new work that is born out of the past work can rival with the original. Which you know can happen, but It is impossible, and it can happen.”

“When I talk to you I echo something that has not been adequately received so I know.”

5//5: It was a reeling sojourn through the Kinemathek museum. This collection was a fantastically arranged look into the actual phenomenon of and affects surrounding film, from culture to industry, politics to aesthetics- the curators of this exhibition accounted for many modes, combinations and styles resulting from these contributing factors, from the earliest excitement about the possibility of capturing image and sound, to the harnessing of film as propaganda and the inverse – film as resistance and reframing. The persistence of film as not only entertainment, but as stage for fostering pubic dialogue and reworking the possibilities of story-telling was a theme throughout. Truth was and is always a central concept in film – and the delineation between truth and fantasy is constantly reworked in film, where critical ‘truths’ are often revealed in the most fantastical settings, and the falsehood of ideology ferments in the inflated realism of propaganda. The history of film itself is a front strewn with the wreckage and ruts of so many attempts – successes and failures, the grandiose and the vulgar. What this chronology fails to capture is the other half, the audience, who, meeting the artists  writers, designers, producers and filmmakers half way, bring their own swaying mass of ideas. Here we see the onward transformation of film as it appeals to and marks out the borders of possibility in the imagination, and the battles between fascist regime and artist/creator, but what lacks is the other half – the impression of the consuming audience. The audience is represented, however, portrayed in the films, as their characters. The continual evolution(and also the recurrence) of these characters and settings, occasionally gives insight into what battles are being waged in the streets. But as always, the distinction between what is being waged in the streets, hearts and minds and what is being impressed upon by the films, is always indistinct. The fourth wall is also a stage for filmmakers. Nietzschean Tragedy thrives here – where is the chorus?

The replication of life on film allows for the conceptualization of modern existence, a conjuring of myths which entrench ideas and physically embody the experience – they take an aura of collective erlebnis, reduce it to two dimensional concept, and recast it back to the acting public – (who truly are the original characters – hence the mass appeal and curiosity towards film) – it reveals our lives to us across the spectrum, from individual contrast to casting universal patterns. The gritty modern, day-to-day, experience, living “aura” under the censor of a regime is fastened to film, reduced to a theme with a moral and a story, the confinement (and reverence) of mild day to day life to the reeling frames of a film reduces the complexity of existence and allows for film to be used as the propagation of a strict, controlled mythology, which reinforces the ideaology of a regime. The films whose auras are expansive- critically reflecting life and encouraging the examination and critique of experience/existence-  rather than reductive, as in propagandist film, are those that immediately banned. These expansive, edgy, critical, wild films, are the first to be prohibited and denounced in National Socialist rhetoric. And so, when All Quiet on the Western Front was adapted to film debuted in 1930, the subsequent riots and disruptions by SA and NSDAP officials led to an immediate ban of the film; the story it told did not uphold the Nationalist ideology of German might and victory across Europe, the prevailing political party held final ruling.

“Under National Socialism, light entertainment dominates, movies offer escape from day-to-day reality, especially after 1939.”

These sanctioned films point away from the rigidity of the regime and the actual experience of the proletariat, and towards a stable future just within grasp. The incredible contrast of propaganda films that depict a banal, conclusive, steadfast and conservative lifestyle, to those of brilliant and strange worlds of phantasy, such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu and Metropolis, which point directly at the day to day existence through an abstract mode of phantasy, was fascinating to realize.