FoolishPeople

How do you travel the strangest of roads?

Most of the time we don't really think about moving. We just do it, and the motor functions and muscles do the rest for us out of habit. It's automatism at its finest, muscle memory that works faster than thought.

But we've all been there when you're thrown into an unfamiliar situation; that moment when your frame of reference has shifted so mightily that everything seems unpredictable.

If we feel negative towards it, often the experience will seem threatening - we'll want to do everything we can to turn back to what we perceive as the status quo. But then again, there's a creative angle to such things - an inescapable newness that may inspire a sense of vast possibility.

Because there's now the chance that the simplest, most ordinary of things can and will assume a new meaning  for you. Because the unfamilliar, the unusual, the strange, and the uncanny forces you to re-evaluate, to fire up those faculties that you used to make sense of things.

Those same engines that were idling, merely ticking over before now, as awareness starts becoming important, because anything can and will happen. Because you're in a new situation, a new world where things work differently.

Your most ordinary of motions become infused with strangeness, and that's precisely what John was talking about in his last post on the Power of Nostalgia - the sense that you hang upon a precipice, or that the barriers, boundaries and screens which lend definition to your world are actually paper thin.

The fact that those very things you count on to make sense are fragile and subject to change is the reason behind the conservative urge, in the apolitical sense.

The Great British - or  English if you prefer - Strangeness with which Foolish People work is, in a sense, precisely about nostalgia in the melancholic Homeric sense. A kind of unease which permeates our work, illustrating the rhythms which exist in spite of human society.

An urge to return to an imaginal home where ritual and  shape may once again connect us to what it means to be human. To violate strictures of linear perception and immerse oneself in the deeply weird.

In that sense, it's unsurprising that the seventies and eighties in Britain were profoundly haunted; the spectre and the apparition may appear from nowhere. Antedilluvian spaceships may be unearthed amidst the concrete and modernist architecture. Ancient pagan rites emerge, fused with the insatiable curiosity of modern science. Atom bombs and athames, astrology and particle physics, nuclear power and telepathic children.

And this is the heart of Strange Factories - a story told in a pagan landscape. A landscape and place that is uncivilised, as the Romans named the countryfolk outside, in the provinces. There is a heretic heathenism to it - a journey down strange roads, with natives that do not obey the mores you know.

Perhaps calling Strange Factories cult cinema is far more accurate than it appears. Like the cult that surrounds Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, FoolishPeople perform rites and acts which may at first seem bizarre and occult in nature to outsiders.

But these rites and performances are at the heart of cultic practice, a shared excperience that bonds people and their environment together. The relationship one has with experience, with environment and culture, and with other people, is subtly altered.

That experience can break and reforge bonds in new ways, so that you may never see things quite the same again. In that sense, it is the nostalgic ache for the long-forgotten, dimly half remembered, that we seek to give you. For though you may not be able to ever go home, to go back, the very ache, the very strangeness provides you with a new awareness of youself and your origin.

The strange crooked roads are lonely and haunted, yet you will find many companions along the way, odd though they may be, and weird their ways. The Hum of Strange Factories is all around you, but its origin, and how you relate to it, is yours and yours alone.

#MinistryofInspiration

"the computerized metropolis appears as a vast, barely disguised penal colony, in which each social system, just as each individual moves in passageways strictly differentiated and regulated by the whole. A penal colony made transparent by the computer networks that keep it under constant surveillance. In this model, metropolitan social space-time mimics the schema of a predictable universe in precarious equilibrium, unbothered by its forced tranquility, subdivided into modular compartments inside of which each worker labors, encapsulated within a specific collective role-like a goldfish in a bowl. A universe regulated by apparatuses of selective retroaction dedicated to the neutralization of all disruptions to the programs system established by the executive. [ . . . J Given the absurd and unsustainable communication in which everyone is inevitably caught, as if ensnared by the paradoxical injunction- that in order to 'speak' one must give up 'communicating,' that to 'communicate' one must give up speaking!-"

 

This feed is currently occupied.

#ministryofinspiration

A Sure Heart Testimonial

Bertrand Wood, 31, New Cross.

As a historian I've always been fascinated by the pre-Sure Heart years. The more I delve into our nation's history the more assured I become as to the inherent rightness of they way in which our country is developing, year by year, as Sure Heart infiltrates all areas of our lives and consciousnesses. Technology, I see it, is a gift that we have finally learned to harness for the good of our society. Our ancestors overvalued freedom. Freedom does little but induce anxiety in citizens; forcing the burden of choice upon their incapable shoulders. As a government historian I've had unprecedented access to first hand accounts of the atrocities for which freedom has repeatedly been to blame. Sure Heart serves to relieve us of this great burden. Of course, there are sacrifices to be made. But those sacrifices, I hope you shall understand, are made in the name of righteousness and above all, justice. I can think of nowhere I'd rather live than in a society as right and just as ours. Citizens, be grateful and proud. We have much to be thankful for.

 

Sure Heart for the Right Start.

#ministryofinformation

 

A Sure Heart Testimonial

Ellen & Jacob Murray, Derbyshire.

"Sure Heart entered our lives when our daughter Jess was born. We didn't realise how much we needed them until she was about six and it dawned on us that she was a bit "different" from other children. She really wasn't applying herself at school or to her extra-curricular activities and she liked to spend a lot of time by herself not being sociable, so we consulted our Sure Heart advisor Samantha and were glad to find out that we weren't alone. Problem behaviour is, Samantha told us, common and we were relieved when she said that it could be quite painlessly eradicated. We learned how to use praise and incentives to build positive behaviour, as well as setting clear expectations and limits for Jess. Samantha taught us that child-rearing is a bit like dog-rearing. They've got to know who is boss and you've got to keep them on a tight leash. You can mould your child to be just the way you want them to be. Thanks to Sure Heart, Jess is now very nearly perfect. With a little more work she'll be the model child that we always dreamed of".

 

Sure Heart For The Right Start

#ministryofinformation

The Virulence Of Combustion

'Need to heat your planet? Install some dinosaurs. The biggest plant-eating dinosaurs pumped out huge amounts of greenhouse gas, helping to keep Earth toasty warm, according to new calculations.

For much of the Mesozoic, the dinosaur era, the long-necked sauropods were one of the dominant groups. Like all herbivores, sauropods probably had gut bacteria to help them digest their food. "They were just containers for a lot of microbes," says David Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University in the UK. The bacteria in the foreguts of herbivores like cows produce methane, which the animals belch out, contributing to climate change. Sauropods probably kept bacteria in their hindguts, and released methane in their farts.

On the basis of data from modern plant-eaters, Wilkinson and his colleagues estimate that the global sauropod population pumped out 520 million tonnes of methane a year, about the same as the total current emissions of the greenhouse gas.

The estimate could be out by a factor of 2, says Wilkinson. "There are a lot of educated guesses."'

 

'WHEREVER there is coal, there will be fire. For centuries, we have dug up the combustible rock to power our industries, and we continue to rely on it to light our homes and keep the wired world humming. But each year millions of tonnes of coal are burned inadvertently, too - in underground fires that even now rage out of control all over the world.

Nowhere is this on more dramatic display than here in Jharia, in India's Jharkhand state, where underground fires have been burning for nearly a century. Dozens of fires are still active in the coal-rich region, exposing residents to a constant stream of air pollution that can include methane, sulphur and mercury. As the seams smoulder away, the ground above them becomes prone to collapse - taking with them any houses, roads or other infrastructure built on the surface.'

 

'Ash from burning coalfields, sparked by massive volcanic eruptions, may have added to the volley of crises that led to the biggest extinction event in Earth's history.

Many factors combined to cause the mass extinction at the end of the Permian period 251 million years ago, during which about 96 per cent of marine species and 70 per cent of those on land went extinct. Several researchers have speculated that volcanism might have set off extensive coal fires that contributed to the extinction, but no clear evidence had been found – until now.

In Permian sediments from the Sverdrup basin in the Canadian Arctic, a team led by Stephen Grasby at the Geological Survey of Canada in Calgary found tiny spherical particles that are evidence of open coal combustion – very different from the ash that comes from burning vegetation.

"It's the first literal smoking gun to show that coal combustion was occurring," says Grasby.'

 

 

Eddie Lenihan - The Black Dog

 

Faeries are not the innocent butterfly creatures you see in Disney movies. They are powerful spirits in old Irish culture that can manifest in any form they wish. In this tale, Eddie Lenihan tells of the giant black dog that comes toe-to-toe with a priest.

With thanks to Craig 'VI' Slee for sharing this.

Hyperreality I: The Inertial Destiny of the Saturated World

This article forms part of the series Rapture & Decay: The New Eschatological Cinema. Read the Introduction here.

 

...modern mankind found itself in the midst of a great absence and emptiness of values and yet, at the same time, a remarkable abundance of possibilities -Marshall Berman.

From Adbusters and the anti-capitalist movement to discussions of "post everything syndrome" and more recent analyses of the London riots; the notion that we live in a disorientating, overloaded, media-driven, celebrity-obsessed world is not a new one. Revolutions are televised. Ikea can help us to sleep better (whilst we may experience the beginnings of split personality disorder leading to the erection of international fighting club franchises, at least we won’t be hospitalised after tripping over badly stored shoes on our way to the bathroom in the middle of the night). Plastic mannequins are more attractive than real women (see case of H&M in the media this week). Disneyland is the ultimate escape from handling your hyperactive, unable-to -play-by-themselves children this Christmas. Lonely? Call in the entertainment factor of your mate Dave, available at the flick of a Freeview remote control.

Semioticians such as Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard have utlitised the term hyperreality to describe how, in advanced postmodern cultures, we are increasingly unable to distinguish fiction from fantasy, the real from the unreal. Our world consists of hollow signs and simulacra where the fake offers a better experience than the real thing. How many Facebook friends do you have? How much of your holiday did you spend snapping away on your digital camera, constructing the perfect narrative to describe the experiences that you want to look like you were having? Did you truly experience anything or were you just projecting your explorer fantasies onto an 18-24, ten day guided coach tour of Hidden India?

Science is beginning to produce results which suggest that the hyperreality hypothesis is more than just an idea; earlier in the year I posted this link to a paper which describes how "digital doppelgangers" can induce false memories in those exposed to them.

Now as an actress, I deal in fictions. But I don't deal in fakes. I’m all for exploring imagination, total unreality, multiple realities, and so on. Yet the fictional worlds which I dip in and out of are ones which I feel very deeply connected to indeed. They become my reality. The problem with hyperreality is that illusion reigns, nothing is felt, everything is sign, simulation, replication, masquerading as reality. It’s the lie that is the dangerous part. We seek simulated stimuli, no longer sure of what is real and what isn’t, not even questioning experiences, forever unfulfilled no matter how much we gorge on "culture" or engage in "exercise" or participate in "down time". We seek out highs and stimuli and entertainments like overwrought addicts.

We are organised and enchained and bored out of our minds.

Take television, for example. Do we ever ask ourselves why we would rather watch a recreation of a scene in an accident and emergency ward rather than doing anything else out of the infinite range of possibilities of "activities" available to us at 8pm on a Wednesday night? As Baudrillard points out, "television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the night, of the other side of things".

Ah- ha, so, we’re afraid of the dark! Baudrillard takes this even further whilst discussing aspects of modern excess and its inherent emptiness:

"Tentacular, protuberant, excrescent, hypertelic: this is the inertial destiny of a saturated world. The denial of its own end in hyperfinality; is this not also the mechanism of cancer? The revenge of growth in excrescence. The revenge and summons of speed in inertia. The masses are also caught in this gigantic process of inertia by acceleration. The masses are this excrescent process, which precipitates all growth towards ruin. It is the circuit that is short circuited by a monstrous finality".

Perhaps we are, ultimately, afraid of this monstrous finality. Afraid of death. And what makes us afraid of death? Fear of our limited time here, fear of underachieving, of lacking a legacy, fear of pain and suffering, fear of a wasted, meaningless existence. Fear of the meaningless of existence. Some people face this fear, decide to drop out, and commit suicide. Some people read Camus and decide to hang on for a bit. Some people join mega churches and pin their hopes on salvation and eternity. Some people audition for X Factor. Some people eat too much. Some people eat too little. Some people turn to drink. Most people try to construct a sense of meaning. Most people try to "think positively". Some people, as Umberto Eco obsesses over, write lists:

"We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die".

There are undeniable forces at work. Forces of chaos, of craved for and enforced order, of seeping unreality and of desperate attempts to reconstruct a former reality. I’m waiting for my box of locally produced organic veg delivered by a fairly paid driver to arrive at my door any minute now.

Sometimes it’s hard to face the future, sometimes the future is uncertain. Sometimes it feels like the world is ending and we wish it would just hurry up. Next time, I’ll take a look at ways in which contemporary filmmakers are exploring the hyperreality hypothesis, of how they are projecting this sense of disorientation and saturation onto film, and why they should even bother attempting it... 

  

(Image: David Dees)

Rapture & Decay: The New Eschatological Cinema, An Introduction.

Upon the purchase of Lars Von Trier’s recently released end-of-the-world movie Melancholia, Boris Kit, the head of Magnolia Pictures, commented, “as the 2012 apocalypse is upon us, it is time to prepare for a cinematic last supper”. Subtitled by Von Trier as a “a beautiful film about the end of the world”, Melancholia delivers not only on Kit’s promise but also succeeds in providing a brutal social critique, masquerading as an archetypal character study which explores the nature of the depressive mind versus that of the socialised individual. Switching from a staged social realism reminiscent of the Dogme films to the fantastical science fiction of the movie‘s second half, Von Trier utilises cinema’s possibilities for the hyperreal similarly to, and as effectively as, Gaspar Noe's nihilistic exploration of life after death Enter the Void.

Both directors specialise in bombarding their audiences with visual and auditory spectacles to numinous ends via shock and awe. But in addition to their shared technological preferences and overridingly nihilistic outlooks, there exists a shared sense of the ecstatic, of the seductiveness inherent in destruction. Von Trier and Noe are masters of the numinous realm, of the creation of cinematic rapture and loaded technological attractions. This often serves the purpose of translating their individual visions of oblivion into the minds of the audience. The results are undeniably beautiful and cathartic. But let's not be bowled over by mere aesthetics, or be fooled into believing that either director believes in shock for shock's sake.

It is apparent, in light not just of 2012 but of the current global situation, that both Von Trier and Noe have captured something of the zeitgeist. They have channeled particular kinds of feelings of futility in the face of a dying planet, a dying capitalist order, a consumerist cultural wasteland, in addition to a more generalised sense of existential doom. But why does this sense of doom, of living in the end times, resonate? Have people of every generation and social order contemplated the notion of living in the end times or is this phenomenon specific to the late capitalist period? What separates the current apocalyptical discourse from previous, more ancient visions of Judgement Day? And why is it that, as Jameson once remarked, we find it easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism? Finally, how is cinema reflecting these feelings, or even, moulding them?

Over the coming weeks and months I shall be posting a series of articles which explore the history and nature of eschatological thought and how these ideas have come to bear on cinema. Along the way I shall encompass elements of film theory, philosophy, psychology and cultural theory in exploring the concept of time itself and the seemingly inevitable outcome of a dead-end consumer culture, all with a focus on The End (of the world, of time, of capitalism).

I also aim to reveal the way in which Strange Factories can be placed within this mileau and how its themes manifest in both the content and form of FoolishPeople's forthcoming Film Fantastique.

Perhaps there will be some light at the end of the tunnel. Perhaps, to paraphrase Half Man, Half Biscuit, the light at the end of the tunnel will be the light of an oncoming train. Nevertheless, I hope you'll take your chances and bear with me. After all, have any of us anything to lose...?

      

(Images: Lars Von Trier's Melancholia; Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void)

Visions of the Future

"the young actors built communal buildings, a small hotel, stables, cowsheds, barns. Each actor built his own house which then became his own property, while everyone took part in communal tasks. It was a Tolstoyan existence. It was to prove an ideal, a way of life and a way of work that would haunt the imaginations of other artists at various times. Vera Komisarjevska, the sister of the director, Theodore Komisarjevska, dreamed of such a community of artists, Copeau formed a group of actors, and, twice in the Vieuz-Columbier, took them away to live and work in the country. His successor, Michel Saint-Denis, did likewise with the Compagnie des Quinze. So did Charles Dullin. So, too, the Group Theatre in America in the 1930s, the Living Theatre, and Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theatre in the 1960s, and Peter Brook and Eugenio Barba. Vera Komisarjevska dreamed of a company of actors united by the same understanding of the art of acting. She came to the conclusion that a theatre of ideas needs interpreters who have been brought up on the ideas and methods of that particular theatre...."

-James Roose-Evans, 1970.

Yes, FoolishPeople are back in the UK after the life and perception altering experience of living and filming Strange Factories in the Czech Republic. Finishing ahead of schedule, we now have only two days of shooting to complete in the UK before the editing and post-production phase can begin. Meanwhile actors and crew alike are undergoing a process of rest, recovery and rejuvenation, greatly assisted by the healing powers of Cesneka (garlic soup) and distant memories of sharing Medovnik (honey cake) over multiple cups of coffee and jugs of Hot Ginger in Prague during our week of exploring the city's forbidden limits (and attempting to re-enter society following a period in the literal and metaphorical wilderness).

Whilst we are itching to reveal all that took place in the depths of Bohemia a level of secrecy must, at this stage, hold tight for the sake of the artistic integrity and the success of the project. However, keep an eye on this space over the coming months as we reveal choice fragments of the process so far, ranging from the beautiful to the downright brutal, traversing the spectrum of human and Otherly experience. 

Most of all, we look forward to sharing the trailer with you...soon, my pretties, soon!

Photo: Lefteris Eleftheriou 

Cinema @ The Settlement

Last night the Strange Factories technical whizz kids (Mr Punch and Yiannis to be exact...Punch insists on a credit...) once again proved their versatility by providing entertainment for the masses; setting up an outdoor cinema at Stronheim's settlement and beaming Aussie indie flick Bad Boy Bubby onto the wall of our beautiful new home. What better way to spend an evening's break from a hardcore shooting schedule than wrapped in blankets under the stars, eating out-of-date popcorn and working our way through a crate of local Czech beer? We look forward to sharing our new screening setup this weekend with our latest arrivals - the winners of the Strange Factories Secrets, Dreams and Storytelling Competition.

As we move into the final stages of our gruelling month of what can only be described as guerilla filmmaking, the transformative nature of our working progress becomes ever clearer. Art and life seep further into one another; a new reality (or rather, surreality?) has been born. Over the past week we have seen actors going missing, animals behaving very strangely, costumed archetypes trudging up hills at sunrise, long journeys with wheelbarrows full of equipment, all events tainted by sleep-deprivation induced delirium. There's something distinctly odd about living on our own filmset. Odd in a good way. We ask ourselves daily, where exactly do we end and our characters begin?

We have been blessed with a technical crew so aligned to the FoolishPeople vision that they are able not only to participate in this month long ritual, fulfilling the most vital roles with a complete understanding of both performative, aesthetic and practical aspects, but also to serve as our audience too. In this sense the camera has become something of a voyeur, a key player in the live performance aspect of the work. The nature of the Strange Factores experience has been, from the outset, defined by such blurring of boundaries, masks and role play, revelations of truth within fiction and vice versa.

Already this film is very much alive. The switch has been flicked. The curtain well and truly lifted. The words cannot go back on the page. And audentia, we are so incredibly excited about sharing our manifestations with you...

(Photo by Yiannis Katsaris)