MITPressLog

Zizek the Movie Buff

On the occassion of the documentary, Zizek!, coming to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston this week, Boston Globe correspondent Damon Smith spoke with Slavoj Zizek about both his own documentary and his interest in film.  Zizek, whose new book, The Parallax View, is just out, pontificates on nearly everything - from radical politics and German philosophy to Hitchcock, opera, and "The Matrix."  But, "to analyze today's iedology," he says, "cinema is the best."

Q: Why'd you agree to let a camera crew trail you around at home and on the lecture circuit?
A: It was very traumatic for me. I don't know why I even said yes. Do you know I haven't seen the movie? I have presented it twice, but both times I insisted on arriving at the end. My only idea was the tasteless [mock] suicide scene at the skyscraper in Ljubljana. I hate public appearances. Except for my passport, I don't have any photos of myself. I'm totally phobic.

Q: I guess we shouldn't expect to see your sequel.
A: Now comes the big irony: After that film, I did two more. I did a multi-part series with Sophie Fiennes [sister of Ralph] called ''Pervert's Guide to Cinema." What I like is it's not about me. It's really about what psychoanalysis can tell us about cinema. And there are some wonderful, tasteless ideas. For instance, they reconstructed some of the sets of Hitchcock and David Lynch movies. Do you remember, toward the end of ''Psycho," where Lila, the sister, goes into the basement and sees Norman's mother, and Mrs. Bates turns around and you see it's only a mummy? We had this scene reconstructed, and somebody touches the mother, she turns around, and you see it's me. [Laughs] The comment was, ''This is much more horrible than Mrs. Bates!"

Q: What fascinates you about the cinema?
A: My big obsession is to make things clear. I can really explain a line of thought if I can somehow illustrate it in a scene from a film. So mostly it's exploiting cinema. On the other hand, to analyze today's ideology, cinema is the best. You have everything there, all the trends and so on. The best auteurs allow you to really think in images, and the best cinema can be a medium of thinking. I pretend to like ''The Matrix" and popular stuff, but privately I like more serious films.

Read more of Zizek's interview (including his thoughts on Spielberg) with Damon here.  More information about Zizek! can be found here. And details and showtimes of the documentary at the Museum of Fine Arts can be found here. 

The Fast and the Futuristic

The French entertainment publication Allocine has reported that action-movie stalwart Vin Diesel has been cast as the lead in Babylon A.D., a big-budget screen adaptation of Maurice Dantec’s underground science fiction thriller Babylon Babies. Diesel's credits include the blockbusters xXx, The Fast and the Furious, and The Pacifier. He is rumored to be cast as the lead, a mercenary named Thoorop who is hired to escort a young woman pregnant with a mutant embryo, a genetically modified messiah whose birth may signal the end of human life as we know it.

Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz (Gothika), the movie will begin shooting in Eastern Europe and Canada in June 2006 and is slated for release in 2007.

The Politics of US Port Security

The Bush administration's plan to sell US port facilities to an Arab-based company has caused quite an uproar among Democrats and Republicans alike.  Today on NPR's On Point, guest host Anthony Brooks analyzed the situation, looking at why Bush is being criticized by Democrats, but also by leaders of his own party.  He also discussed the potential ramifications this move would have on our port security.  His guests included David Sanger (White House correspondent for the New York Times), Congressman Curt Weldon (R-Pennsylvania), Juliette Kayyem, Lecturer in public policy and homeland security at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and coauthor of Protecting Liberty in an Age of Terror, Elizabeth, New Jersey mayor J. Christian Bollwage, and On Point News Analyst Jack Beatty.  Each provided a unique and lively perspective on what they call the "sound and fury and the politics of home security."

In case you missed it, you can listen to the entire hour here. 

Frank's Drawings

Everyone knows what the distinctive curves and lines of Frank Gehry’s buildings look like.  But how on earth does he come up with them?  For Gehry, drawing is an important part of his creative process.  He has described drawing as his way of “thinking aloud.”  Frank’s Drawings: Eight Museums by Gehry, an exhibition currently at the The University of Toronto Art Centre looks at his architectural sketches.  Spanning 25 years, the exhibition will include 49 original pen-on-paper drawings of eight museum projects, a selection of Gehry’s sketchbooks from the late 1970s and early 1980s, and an array of telephone-pad/thumbnail sketches never before shown.  Exhibition curator Larry Richards said:

This is a rare opportunity to see Frank Gehry’s mind and hand at work and to see some of the spontaneous, generating drawings that have lead to his astonishing architecture.

More information about the exhibit, which runs through June 17th can be found here.  To see more of Gehry’s drawings, check out Gehry Draws, edited by Mark Rappolt and Robert Violette which traces Gehry’s thinking through 32 major projects (both built and unbuilt) with over 500 drawings (like the one above of MIT's Stata Center) and more than 400 additional illustrations, providing a privileged view of the creative practice of a master architect.  A look at Gehry's drawings in action can be seen in Nancy E. Joyce's Building Stata: the Design and Construction of Frank O. Gehry's Stata Center at MIT. 

Reconstructing Media

As a part of their "Media Makers & Shakers" series, The WGBH Lab has been discussing the pressing trends in broadcast media and the future of television with filmmakers, journalists, and scholars.  Recently, they caught up with avant-gard multimedia artist, Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky, the Subliminal Kid), author of Rhythm Science to discuss creativity in the digital media age. 

Watch the interview here. (You'll need Quicktime).

Also, if you are in the New Haven area, Miller will be lecturing at Yale's art depatment Thursday (2/23).  He'll be discussing Rhythm Science at the Holcombe T Green Jr. Hall at 12:30. The talk will be moderated by Steven Madoff and Peter Halley, the chair of Yale's art department wrote a response to Miller's book (which can be found here). This is sure to be an interesting discussion. 

A President Shaping the Future

Delivered on April 10, 1991,Charles M Vest delivered his Inaugural Address, becoming the 15th President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  The speech, "MIT: Shaping the Future," looked at MIT's strong dedication to bringing change to the world beyond the boundaries of its campus.  A lot has happened since Vest's speech in 1991, but much of his message still applies today:

Now MIT prepares for the passing of the 20th century and the advent of the 21st. We seek form and substance appropriate for these times, even as we seek to shape the future of our nation and world.

But we enter more than a new temporal era. We stand at the dawn of a new global age. Our lives are interwoven across national boundaries in unprecedented ways--connected through our earth's environment, whose stewardship we all share, through our economic and production systems, through instantly shared information, through universally shared dreams. These dreams include the vision of a world in which the security of nations is defined by economic and social dexterity rather than by military might. And they include the vision of a nation that has regained its sense of social justice and is truly the land of opportunity for all.

MIT has played a remarkable role--at critical moments--in shaping our nation and our world. We have done so through individual creative genius and through grand institutional ventures. Like America itself, we have responded in an heroic and innovative manner to sudden challenges, such as the onset of World War II or the launching of Sputnik. Today we are challenged once again on a grand scale. But this time by slow, corrosive forces rather than by sudden, galvanizing events. By the erosion of our global environment rather than by explosions at Pearl Harbor. By declines in scientific literacy and industrial competitiveness rather than by the launching of a satellite.

--Excepted from Pursuing the Endless Frontier: Essays on MIT and the Role of the Research University by Charles M. Vest.  More information about the book and the remainder of Vest's Inaugrural Address can be found here. 

The New Perils of Being a Couch Potato Academic

In case any of you book-spurning technolators out there are reveling in the hope that our digital manifest destiny is close at hand, take a look at the cautionary evidence that the Wall Street Journal's John Letzing put forth before you forsake your local academic library for the Google Book Search.

Tales of the Internet's unreliabilty as a research tool have been swapped for years, and you may have noticed that Wikipedia has recently taken quite a beating in the press. Tackling a different angle of this issue, Letzing talks with Geoffrey Bowker, author of the new book Memory Practices in the Sciences, about how infomation is getting marginalized or lost. The digitization process is unavoidably incomplete, leaving certain realms of scholarship behind. If scholars fail to get out and scour through the stacks, the users of digital databases are left "hoeing the same kind of territory."

Pablo Boczkowski furthers this point by accusing many academics of "failure to get out of their chairs." He is dismayed that people don't go to libraries anymore to research and thus cheat themselves of the "serendipity of accidental discoveries" and the "unexpected gems" that so helped him research his book, Digitizing the News.

The Wall Street Journal Online has the digital article. Your local libary has that lovely old book smell.

Loving Father/Heartless Terrorist

Eastern Europe's philosophical enfant terrible, Slavoj Žižek, after having broken down The Matrix and Fight Club, has something to say the "tragic-ethic grandeur" of the characters in TV's 24:

They are something like the psychological equivalent of decaffeinated coffee, doing all the horrible things the situation necessitates, without paying the subjective price for it.

What?!?  Žižek, whose latest book, The Parallax View comes out next month, writes for In These Times on moral ambiguity from the Bhagavad-Gita to Apocalypse Now.

Critiquing Art Critics

Should artists be able to freely create without worrying about how their work will be received?  Three prominent American artists met recently at the Center for British Art at Yale University to tackle this question.  The artists, Sam Durant, Hans Haacke, and Andrea Fraser, participated in the panel, “Artistic Practice as Institutional Critique” which was moderated by Jennifer Gross.  They discussed the difficulties contemporary artists can experience trying to balance creating their art and living up to the expectations of the modern art historian and American museums.  In an article for the Yale Daily News, Makda Asrat looked at how each artist handled this issue in their work.  Of Andrea Fraser, author of Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser (edited by Alexander Alberro), which investigates and reveals the social structures of art and its institutions, Asrat said:

A performance and video installation artist, Fraser departed from the norm and declined to be introduced by Gross. Instead, she approached the podium and announced herself that "the next presenter will be Andrea Fraser." Fraser cycled through a series of personas, commenting on the work of her fellow panelists and calling attention to the hypocritical (and sometimes paradoxical) behavior of many contemporary artists.

After her entertaining introduction, which evoked suppressed sniggers from many audience members, Fraser assumed her "real" persona and explained that her work is meant to examine the relationships between artists, collectors and museums.

Or Not So Happy

And just in case you're in a non-Romantic mood, inclined to sneer at this most Hallmarkish of holidays, may we suggest some anti-Valentine's Day literature?