Stories We Tell - Sarah Polley

This is the film I mentioned
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/stories-we-tell-20130920-2u4d2.html

I haven't seen it... I will look for it.

essay film

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/deep-focus/essay-film

Relation, Antipodes and Ranciere

We have been emailing a lot recently, stemming from your building my website, because you were always the skilled one in the household, I the creative blob. Anyway, I have a number of other collaborative blogs, some more successful than others. And I thought we have rich conversations and lots in common. For instance, we have a similar hair although yours is a little thinner, similar faces though mine is a little more like a melon, with fatter cheeks, similar thought patterns though you have achieved a level of pragmatism I, well, haven't. We are also mother and daughter which creates a considerable common ground. Interestingly and obviously, you are of a different generation and you live nearly at the antipode of my current country of residence (actually, you'd have to plop yourself in the sea south-east of New Zealand to actually occupy my antipodal point geographically). If I am loftily musing on 'temporal' as well as 'linguistic' translation in my dissertation - translation of ideas between generations, as well as between cultures - then I think a collaborative blog between us, each from different generations, with different senses of history and in different countries, is a pragmatic and close-to-heart way to explore what do and do not understand in each others' experience with reference to the ideas of others and our own ideas. Also, anything, however trivial, can be on the topic of discussion.

Thinking about your email regarding Baudrillard's simulacra, I just read on this hip version of a philosophy for dummies website, Jacques Ranciere's disregard for these kinds of ideas:

"And then there’s Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard, who started his career by telling everybody to “Forget Foucault” is an academic troll par excellence. The theorists of simulation has taken Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and turned it into a nihilistic portrait of doom and despair. But Ranciere ain’t got time for that. Writing in “The Misadventures of Critical Thought” he says “theorists of simulation” (a not-so-subtle reference to Baudrillard)  are at the heart of simulation itself.

The Marxism of the denunciation of the mythologies of the commodity, the fallacies of consumer’s society and the empire of the spectacle. Forty years ago, it was supposed to unmask the machineries of domination, in order to provide the anti-capitalist fighters with new weapons. It has turned to exactly the contrary: a form of nihilist knowledge of the reign of the commodity and the spectacle, of the equivalence of anything with anything and of anything with its image

…The current disconnection between the critical procedures and any perspective of emancipation only reveals the disjunction at the heart of the critical paradigm. It may make fun of its illusions but it remains enclosed in its logic. This is why I think it is necessary to re-examine the genealogy of the concepts and procedures of that logic and the way in which it got intertwined with the logic of social emancipation.

- The Misadventures of Critical Thought"

It's not difficult for me to pinpoint what Ranciere means by "a form of nihilist knowledge of the reign of the commodity and the spectacle, of the equivalence of anything with anything and of anything with its image ", because this in itself has come to pass as critique in art school. Being the commodity in order to somehow (know one knows how) critique it.