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a spectre looms is haunting past film ng academia

thomas wartenberg challenges the well-founded assumption that
narrative cinema inherently supports the dominant social interests,
following from that melding of philosophy and cinema that began with
cavell, and what better example than slutpod and gaza.

ok, so we all know they share numerous features. they're both inbred
from the toes to their hairs. gaza can't help but jerk off if it isn't
in front of his bedroom buddy's pc it's at the local public library.
we all know his story. and yet, his obscure name-dropping is enough to
pile heaps and heaps of drivel that wouldnt stand two seconds in a
crowd with a minimum of experience in life and cinema. all his whining
about how eisenstein, mizoguchi and tarkovsky doesnt surpass anything
you'd expect from a texas red neck like doberman to know. and his skin-
deep political economics, repeated line after line, paragraph after
paragraph, show why even the most fanatic at chicago university wont
have him and nobody will publish his books, even in these days of
steven levitts and pinkers. it all sums up to his irritation that
after kant, duchamp and foucault all the art he can offer is the
circus and the theatre. 'art can't be taught' he'll say just because
it can't be taught the way he wants it taught. cinema as an apparatus
is his friend; all is fine and dandy as long as dvds are for sale and
cinema degenerates into multiplexes and art belongs to the dystopian
randite/stewe bogus world of intellectual property. that way he can
hoard off the huge growth and revival of some of the greatest
attitudes to cinema that we've had in the 20th century, back in town
thanks to peer to peer file sharing systems like emule, pando, dc++
and a burgeoning film culture embodied in the likes of fileheaven,
cinexilio or divxclasico. now art has found a hole throu the global
village, in the worst sense of the term village, and marcel hanoun has
his own website, rivettes, perlovs, ceylans, garrels, eustaches,
ferraras, denis, alexander kluges, thom andersons, tsai ming liangs,
kiarostamis, keillers, dumonts and a rich array of artists are now at
the reach of one's fingers. not ot mention a true portrayal of the
iraq war. likewise, this feeds back to the directors, like with the
recent i'm not there, a miracle to come out of a hollywood that hadn't
produced that kind of stuff since the star wars debacle. so while
before the massification and beastialization taken for natural,
granted and positive were both sutshit's and gaza's only claims to
reason, all of this has finally been proved to be a façade.

so as movie and music sales dwindle, these can leave the oppressive
public sphere and finally become part of the private one. cinema and
music no longer fall to the lowest common denominator and consist in
that sweaty notion of all that makes us similar and the same, but
rather belong to the freedom of the particular.

in no previous era had this happened. both these mediums before had
suffered from the backlash of the fetish of property, which was the
only superstructure that allowed figures like gaza and sutpen to be
produced. as it now turns out, people were never listening to what
they wanted, but to what the radio waves owned. as it now turns out,
they were brainwashed and weren't allowed to share in a free art. they
were watching what weinstein wanted them to watch, not what they
wanted to if they had a chance.

so back to that unlikely couple. that foaming at the mouth far right
idiot gaza is joined by the far left chomsky of the group sutpen in a
desert of the real that recalls many of our post-political scenes.
caricaturesque more like it, for chomsky spends his time on theory and
grammatical terminology enough to make snoopy snoop, sutpen has only
his attention-deficit addled brain as a claim to reason. what does his
decisionism consist of? well it's damn similar to his married other;
if he has attention problems, only responds to picture, can't
articulate a coherent thought and thinks he can condemn whatever his
fetish decides is pedagogical didacticism, it means the rest of the
world, The People, think like him. humiliated too by the surge in file
sharing, he has nothing left to whine about except for a lost american
golden age that consists in a 90s hollywood that meets 30s and 40s
straitjacked classical 'golden age'. most amusing are his attacks on
'academia' when he's the very embodiment of that term himself. only
difference is his prose lies on the pompous side of gaza's repetitious
aphasic and uniphonic tone.

and, hold on, what does slutpod's attention and fetish amount to?
apparently, anyone who doesn't dig comics, movies over writing about
movies, literature about dirt realism and about literature goes
against nature because, well, slutpod is nature. if it isnt slutpod,
it's a fabricated spectre of coerced interpretive communities. nobody
wants to speak about what they're speaking, nobody means what they
say, everyone's repressed if they dont follow sutpen's fetishes. so,
eureka, we have yet another unit with the intellectual reach of a
stewe. moving the goal-posts is just the tip of the iceberg. what
hides behind slutpod? just how easy it is to criticise a teacher when
you have 'everything' as your claim to reason. and why criticise a
teacher, well because cinema can't be taught because slutpod never was
too busy jerking off to pauline kael and andrew sarris in classroom.
which brings us back- and if this were another article in a true
sophist's manner- full circle to gaza's agenda.