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Masao Adachi notes, apropos of the film theory he and others developed in the late 1960s: “All the landscapes which one faces in one’s daily life, even those such as the beautiful sites shown on a postcard, are essentially related to the figure of a ruling power.” As part of the collective project of “landscape theory” (fúkeiron [風景論]), Adachi’s work repeatedly evokes a sense of this “all.” Capitalist totality is the premise of a changing landscape that compels his attention as the camera surfaces into it in figures 1 and 2.

Adachi’s films and writings, and their continuity with his activities with the Japanese Red Army and thereafter, have therefore attracted the attention of critics who emphasize totality as a crucial term for anti-capitalisms. Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkel adduce Adachi’s landscape film and theory as they register the problem that “the indifference of concrete abstraction” poses for strategic and tactical analyses of a capitalist plenum. Like the “anti-cognitive aesthetic” of photographer Lewis Baltz’s “new topographics,” they note, Adachi’s landscape film is among the critical experiments that press home the limits of “the notion of a metalanguage that could capture, that could represent, capitalism as such.”

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“Je ne peux pas admettre la proximité de mon visage et de mon vagin” (I cannot accept the proximity of my face and my vagina). So says Alice (Charlotte Alexandra), the troubled teenaged protagonist of Catherine Breillat’s 1976 feature-film debut, Une vraie jeune fille (US release title A Real Young Girl). As we hear these words in voice-over, Alice sits in her bedroom examining her reflection in a foggy mirror. The frame of the mirror, doubling the frame of the screen, isolates her face in close-up. Moments earlier, Alice had applied red ink to the lips of her vulva in a close-up that retrospectively appears to be the counterpoint to this one. Though Alice can’t accept their proximity, face and sex are constantly made proximate in the montage and camerawork of Une vraie jeune fille, which oscillates between the two as if trying to enframe their incommensurability, to distill it into visual terms. In the movement from the one to the other, the film formally renders a conundrum that will preoccupy the filmmaker throughout her career.

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The fistula in ano, an infected tunnel that connects the anal canal and a secondary opening in the skin, that external perianal opening which may be visible, and which usually results from anorectal pustules that produce the hollow damp antrum, the cavity which will have to be evaluated for depth and extent of the tract, and from which built-up debris renders (as in hot oil, tried from the fat; as in presenting for inspection or consideration; as in payment due, as though a tribute) a foul-smelling drainage and thin yellow exudate, a bloody brown percolation from the blocked septic glands, a forced draining in another organ that may allow feces to pass to the skin, & note it can be chronic, and of course, once ruptured, what is suppurating results also in swelling and chills and great pain, usually requires, as abscesses generally do, some form of surgery. And when the fourteenth-century English surgeon John of Arderne details his technique for treating anal fistulae in his definitive treatise on the subject, his Practica the first medieval surgical manuscript to be accompanied by copious illustration of operation in hundreds of colorful marginalia, at the limit of linguistic description, carefully coordinated with the text but aiming to move from the word to show the fistulous holes, the curing needle going in the tender mouth of the “depe wonde,”...

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Nineteen seventy-seven was a very fine year. Particularly for fans of disillusionment and social fracture. In the United Kingdom, Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her silver jubilee to the sound track of the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen”—or at least she would surely have done so, had the BBC and the Independent Broadcasting Authority not denied the record access to the airwaves. On the day the Sex Pistols released their single (May 27), the 1977 Cannes Film Festival closed, at which Marguerite Duras’s film Le camion had been entered (unsuccessfully) in the Feature Film competition.

If “God Save the Queen” stared down its contemporaries with a kind of twisted swagger, knowingly summoning up the nightmare of a lumpenproletariat blessed with invincible intelligence, Le camion exudes an equally invincible exhaustion. According to Duras, the film proposes a joyful embrace of the void that lies the other side of all projects—social, political, or cinematic. Despite their dramatic tonal differences, the two works are in fact tied together by more than an apparent accident of timing—among other things, by a shared avant-gardist inheritance, via Debord in particular, to which we will return below. For now, suffice it to note that both give voice to a lucid refusal—visceral in one case, defiantly world-weary in the other—of the nihilistic pseudo-values they find around them, most notably that nihilism which consists in inhabiting time according to the calculation of monetizable investment.

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To rise up. First off, to raise up one’s fear and cast it off, to throw it far away. Or even to throw it directly in the face of those who hold the power of organizing our fears. This is also to lift up one’s desire. To take it—and with it one’s expansive joy—in order to throw it in the air, in such a way that it disperses through the space that we breathe, the space of others, the space of the public and the political as a whole. There are two images of this—two corollary images—in the praiseworthy and long-censored film by Mikhail Kalatozov, Soy Cuba. These images refer to the popular, and chiefly student, uprising that terminated in 1956 in the streets of Santiago de Cuba and of Havana. The first image is that of a fireship [un brûlot]: one sees some young students throw Molotov cocktails onto the drive-in movie screen on which the official images of the dictator Fulgencio Batista are projected. In the past, a “fireship” designated a ship equipped with flammable materials or explosives, designed to collide into an enemy ship and set it ablaze. It now refers to subversive political writings, or even to tracts calling for outright revolt.

The other image is exactly that of such tracts dispersed by the same student revolutionaries.

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The most economic notion of dwelling that I am aware of was expressed in the most economical fashion in a 1923 aphorism by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier: “La maison est une machine à demeurer” (The house is a machine for dwelling). One year later, in his book Toward an Architecture, Le Corbusier slightly changed the formulation to “La maison est une machine à habiter” (The house is a machine for living in).

Although the modification seems to be negligible, the difference between demeurer and habiter is quite significant. The former has a tinge of passivity about it, whereas the latter entails an active inhabiting of a place, rendering it familiar and one’s own. We will have a chance to revisit this difference, but for now all we can register is how it has been absorbed without remainder into the determination of the house as a machine.

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A review of Nealon, Jeffrey T., Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).

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A review of Huyssen, Andreas, Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).

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