{"id":451,"date":"2007-02-10T17:58:00","date_gmt":"2007-02-10T17:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/wordpress\/?p=451"},"modified":"2010-01-10T15:59:25","modified_gmt":"2010-01-10T15:59:25","slug":"filler-by-proxy-xlvi-london-and-daisies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/2007\/02\/filler-by-proxy-xlvi-london-and-daisies.html","title":{"rendered":"Filler by Proxy XLVI: London and Daisies"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

I like the idea of movies but usually don’t go to see any, which leaves me with a small, erratically selected pool of films to draw upon when I find myself in a conversation about cinema. Found more or less by chance, two bloggers have been writing more or less recently about two of my favourite films: Patrick Keiller’s London <\/span>and Vera Chytilova\u2019s Daisies<\/span>.<\/div>\n
Books and movies in which the city becomes a character have always touched a special something inside me, and London <\/span>comes out on the top of this internal list. I’ve mentioned it in passing once or twice before<\/a>: it’s the movie that convinced me that moving to London wouldn’t be a total loss, no matter what else happened.<\/div>\n
The Measures Taken<\/a> seizes upon some of Keiller’s ideas and cinematic techniques, as part of a description of his latest project:<\/div>\n
\n

It still feels like a peculiar gesture though, to follow these films with a project made up of around 60 films from the 1900s, which are then spun into a coherent narrative on the one hand, or on the other affixed to map of the world, with highlighted cities or streets taking you via a click to footage of that area in the first decade of the 20th century. We are in fairly Borges-like territory here, wheeling from Shanghai to New York to Liverpool, zeroing in on discrete streets with lunatic exactitude. It isn’t entirely clear what this project is…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

I first saw Daisies <\/span>while lying on my side, quite drunk, half on top of someone else, as it was projected onto a wall in a small bar down a backstreet somewhere in Melbourne, and have been infatuated with it ever since. “That film could only have been made in the 60s,” a friend once remarked after watching W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism<\/span><\/a>. “People have never been so dirty in quite the same way.” Daisies<\/span> has that same, ineffable quality, and the same cheerful anarchy to it, but is even less encumbered by theories – even countercultural ones.<\/div>\n
It’s one of the few cultural artifacts I’ve seen built upon a presumption of abundance instead of scarcity, affirmatively blowing social and political dialectics away. The Pinocchio Theory<\/a> gives us a more substantial appreciation of Daisies<\/span>.<\/div>\n
\n

… manages to be both visceral and abstract, playful and savage, intellectual and infantile, all at once. Watching it last night, I was literally trembling with joy and exhilaration. I felt the same way when I first saw the film, nearly thirty years ago.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Found via sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy<\/a>, written by the same bloke who does The Measures Taken<\/a>. It’s all like cellophane!<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I like the idea of movies but usually don’t go to see any, which leaves me with a small, erratically selected pool of films to draw upon when I find myself in a conversation about cinema. Found more or less by chance, two bloggers have been writing more or less recently about two of my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=451"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3588,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451\/revisions\/3588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}