“It is not an uncommon condition, this feeling of being constructed out of some ambient, floating parts of the Internet.”
Chiara Brasi’s film is a Wikipedia text—
her plot was based on a single web search. The Web gives us the unintended, a replenishable boon. This page will collect articles of interest to those who seek The Unintended.
Insurrecto as Wikipedia Novel
CAUGHT IN A TRAP.
I imagined Virginie Brasi watching Elvis at maybe minute 3:06 in this video. As Elvis does his karate moves, shakes and sweats, with the crowd captive in his trap, and he captive in theirs, the video becomes increasingly astonishing. The song catches him in the beautiful sequined cage of his celebrity, of his sex, and of the crowd's orgasmic love. I watch this over and over again, trapped myself in my erotic response to the thrill of someone else's powerful display of desire for me—the fiction of my power, in his need to seduce. You see, what’s very powerful is that Elvis, too, is occupied: by the power of black music, for one, which he appropriates with his sequined cape: US race and settler history lies in his thrill.
SHALL I COMPARE ELVIS TO A LONELY POLAR BEAR?
The beauty of the scene lies in its virtuality: the observer and the observed in a single frame. The kind of subject best done with film, maybe. Anyway, hard to say in words. Like Elvis being watched by the crowd in the scene in Las Vegas, the polar bear, too, seems to me a magical, a wavering, shuddering white figure, simulacrum of a self before a crowd.
"The director says what she wants is a sense of a ghost rising from a river, a whitish impression that at first seems like sea foam, or maybe the languorous swimming of a despondent polar bear moving in figure eights in a man-made pond, or a fluttering flag of surrender, but of course it turns out to be Cassandra’s flesh, her whiteness establishing the frame."
"I AIN'T GOT NO QUARREL WITH THE VIET CONG"
"My conscience won't let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn't put no dogs on me, they didn't rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people. Just take me to jail."
Some more words of life's wisdom from Ali here.
EVERYTHING HAD A RHINESTONE.
The robe Elvis gave to Muhammad Ali. There are two videos on it, the second one talking about the error on the robe. Second video here.
THE CAMERA'S EYE IN THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR
is boring. Long, tedious shots of a ship moving. Then suddenly a startling scene of a firing squad, and right before your eyes Cubans are killed. The scene of the moving ship and the scene of the killed Cubans are all equivalent in the camera's eye in the Spanish-American war. The film shows Filipinos in their trenches defending against the Americans. Suddenly they fall and an American flag is waving over them. The poignancy of the shot lies in the viewer.
What you discover in the Library of Congress film archives
is that the scenes of war are REENACTMENTS (the 2 Edison films here). Edison and his minions, seers of a new order, inventing a novel way to see, ironically recomposed history first via this forgotten war: the Philippine-American War gave birth to history as motion-picture entertainment. Note the resource notes: African Americans played Filipinos dying in the trenches. If these films are not symptom and braid of History as it is, I don't know what is.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WE DON’T STOP HERE.
I’ve watched Mulholland Drive only once. But it seems to me I’ve seen it forever, on a loop. The doubling! The unknowing! The vertigo! The karaoke—I mean, the night club singing! Should my director have seen Mulholland Drive one thousand nine hundred and one times amid her cabal in the Catskills mansion? Sure. Or embody Rita (or is it Diane) in a Pajero on the way to Balangiga in her too-high wedges and short shorts? Or is Balangiga in Mulholland Drive? Who knows and why not. I still don’t know what the doubling means: I’m interested in its effects.
DIANE ARBUS IS AT THE MET.
"...She is no wild thing, no, not a Diane Arbus..."
But as Arbus said, and Magsalin might quote: “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” Such is the case of The Unintended—a layer within a layer within a layer—and what is the secret for?
