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Thoughts Held Hostage

03.04.2022 by M Donaldson // Leave a Comment

As I do the mental strength training to reenter the world of blogging, a war rages on. Once more, my thoughts seem held hostage. Writing through this is an option, but I’m not sure if music recommendations and snarky asides will cut it.

‘Inspiration blogs’ are essential right now — these are the blogs that I look to for a glimpse at how others are managing in tough times, something I mentioned in my guide to blogging. Kottke is a good one to peruse as Jason continues to post about topics ranging from meaningful to frivolous, but not without acknowledging the weighted sadness of current events. Warren Ellis has started blogging again (and a reason for his recent absence should be noted) — his casual but steady approach to blogging reminds me not to overthink the process. And then there’s James A, Reeves’ Atlas Minor, which proves that there’s a lot that’s fascinating and rewarding in blogging about what’s going on in the internal spaces.

Today is Bandcamp Friday1And I’ll have plenty more to say about Epic Games’ acquisition of Bandcamp soon.. If you’re a fan of the type of music I regularly write about here, you should venture over to A Closer Listen’s list of Ukrainian artists to support. I’m breezing through it as I type this and discovering many brilliant new-to-me ambient/electronic/post-rock sounds.

Also, Peter Kirn highlighted an expansive spreadsheet devoted to Ukrainian bands and artists to explore. He’s picked a few excellent recommendations to peep in his post.

And, via The Quietus, here’s a list of benefit compilations “for those looking to buy some Ukraine-supporting music on the latest Bandcamp Friday.”

Morning reading: Smithsonian Magazine gives some 20th-century historical context to the war over Ukraine. This article also helped me better understand some of the themes in Come And See, which I wrote about previously. Adam Tooze’s Chartbook newsletter is invaluable in understanding what’s going on in this war and what it means for world affairs. I admit a lot of what ‘The Tooze’ writes about goes over my head, but I have just as many “oh, I see now” moments, too. I’m also working through Tooze’s conversation with Ezra Klein on Klein’s podcast — dense but illuminating stuff. (Not Ukraine related: Klein’s episode last week with philosopher C. Thi Nguyen talking about how games are always present in our lives is a humdinger.)

Categories // From The Notebook, Listening Tags // Adam Tooze, Bandcamp, Blogging, Current Affairs, Ezra Klein, James A. Reeves, Jason Kottke, Ukraine, Warren Ellis

Come and See

02.27.2022 by M Donaldson // 3 Comments

Come and See film still

Come and See is a Boschian vision of war falling out of a maddening nightmare. It’s a horror movie made all the more terrifying and tragic in that its lessons remain unlearned, its warnings unheeded, its trauma unresolved. Last night, as I watched the film unfold from the safety of my living room, the people of Kyiv experienced their third night of terror. No lessons learned. Devastating.

Here’s a good essay from author Steve Huggins on Come and See which contains this summation of the film’s plot and theme:

The central character of Come and See is Flor, the 14-year-old boy who represents the Russian people. He joins the partisans, loses his family to the Nazis, and then witnesses first-hand the annihilation of an entire peasant village. At the end-credits he disappears into the Russian forest with the partisans. Nothing in the film takes place outside Flor’s immediate experience. We see all the action through his eyes. But is he fully innocent of his own village’s destruction? A dying villager appears to blame him, saying “I told you not to get the gun.” Is Flor willingly complicit; can we read his survival as a form of collaboration? At one point Flor sleeps on the carcass of a dying cow whose eyes roll helplessly in their sockets. Like Flor himself, the bewildered cow takes in everything, but comprehends nothing but the terror.

In his essay, Huggins notes that the film marked a sea change in Soviet/Russian culture and attitudes, foreshadowing the approaching Glasnost era. The piece also shows parallels with present attempts by the Russian state to rewrite history in order to manipulate public sentiment. Again, from the essay:

Aleksandr Shpagin judged Come and See “…the apogee of war as religion.” He is most certainly wrong. To interpret war as religion, it must be imbued with mystical qualities and heroic – if not superhuman – characters. Indeed, Soviet war films of the 1940s through 1960s did just this. Self-sacrifice and fevered patriotism ennobled its participants and legitimized the Soviet experiment. Come and See is the antithesis of these goals.

This observation from Will Stone of 3:AM Magazine rings eerily familiar to the present conflict/invasion:

In terms of the viewer’s emotional upheaval after watching it, Come and See has little to do with what people consider a conventional war film. It is a film about internecine human atrocity, the sudden and brutal loss of innocence, the impotence of the guileless, the appalling rupture of benign rural communities by technologically enabled destructive forces spewing from a poisonous ideology. It is about how men are capable of committing the most heinous acts at the frayed end of a psychopath’s ideological whip and how the stain of unhinged reasoning spreads into a destructively motivated crowd, but also how the determined victim collective produces an equally powerful will to resist the occupier and bring justice or at least survival to the subjected.

YouTube essayist Josh Matthews also inadvertently relates Come and See to the invasion of Ukraine — inadvertently because he recorded these thoughts in August 2020:

This movie is called all over the internet an anti-war movie. I very strongly disagree with that label. Anti-war generally means pacifist or near-pacifist. That is, someone who won’t fight in a war or refuses to take part in a war because war is just too devastating … but I think this movie is actually an anti-invader movie instead of an anti-war movie.

Eli Friedberg of Film Stage describes Come and See in an accurate and lyrical description, noting that nature plays a major role as an innocent but unflinching bystander:

Klimov’s technique, and thus the film’s sense and layering of realities, is intentionally chameleonic, shifting back and forth between cold-eyed realist war memoir and surreal impressionist nightmare–a reverie in which dreams, myths and visions meld seamlessly into the dispassionate facts of history and the conscious artifice of the cinema. In these mesmerizing stretches ambient sound surges and plummets; characters gaze eerily into the camera with shimmering ghostly eyes, uttering anguished cries and otherworldly portents. While not invoked by name, the spirits and customs of East European folklore hang heavy over the film–in sets, in incidental dialogue, in the persistent presence of animals as symbols and messengers. Like Terrence Malick, Klimov presents the natural world and folk culture as a space of prime and savage spiritual order, a transcendental flow violently interrupted by the intrusion of the twentieth century’s industrial war machine with its industrial secular ideologies, a shapeless but terrible behemoth which permits no spirit, faith or love to exist in its wake.

Director Ari Aster notes in Film Comment how Elem Klimov never made another film:

He would never make another film after Come and See, which is just as well. It has a way of making most other films feel utterly superfluous. Has any work ever reflected the adage “war is madness” more powerfully? … As a travelogue of hell, a catalog of horrors, and a single-minded transference of never-to-be-resolved historical traumas, Come and See has not, to my knowledge, been topped. If it ever should be, the result would be unendurable.

Finally, the use of sound and perspective in Come and See are both amazing and you can understand why by watching this video essay from The Cinema Cartography:

Come and See is harrowing but you should absolutely watch it. It’s streaming now on The Criterion Channel, rentable from other digital outlets, and also floating around on YouTube if you do a search (though the video quality there won’t do it justice).

Categories // Watching Tags // Movie Recommendations, Russia, Ukraine, war

8sided.blog

 
 
 
 
 
 
8sided.blog is an online admiration of modernist sound and niche culture. We believe in the inherent optimism of creating art as a form of resistance and aim to broadcast those who experiment not just in name but also through action.

It's also the online home of Michael Donaldson, a curious fellow trying his best within the limits of his time. He once competed under the name Q-Burns Abstract Message and was the widely disputed king of sandcastles until his voluntary exile from the music industry.

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