User:FluffyDunlop/ReadingWriting2/Thesis Ido Draft

IDEOLOGY TROUGH ACTS OF KILLING AND POVERTY with help from zizek

[steve notes~: abstract-- bibliography- Harvard method= (Smith 6). pThe text is at its strongest where you link ideology to Anwar's desire- the way he uses cinema to enact his fantacies]

Ideology explained by Slovene Philosopher and Psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek in a “Perverts Guide to Ideology” a documentary where Zizek focuses on “the mechanics that shape what we believe and how we behave” (Zizek) In this 136 minute documentary Zizek goes inside movies to explain and expose their underlying ideologies. One of the first movies he touches upon is “They Live” from John Carpenter. A drifter called Nada finds a box of sunglasses that give the user of such sunglass the ability to see the world in black and white and see subliminal totalitarian commands to obey and conform. This example is a good metaphor for ideology. In a way the world without sunglasses gives you interpretations and suggestions of your surroundings. These interpretations and suggestions form the viewer. The sunglasses give the user an insight in a different world where previous experiences are not what they seem in the first place and makes you question more at what could have been or what is. There are other movies that Zizek touches upon, but they are more examples and explanations of what hidden ideologies Zizek found in those movies.

The documentaries “The act of killing” and “Enjoy Poverty!” are two good examples of connection the “real” world with an ideological fictions world. [but the disturbing thing is that the 'real world' and the fictional-fantasy world of ideology one and the same: fantasy shapes reality] The director Joshua Oppenheimer takes us on a trip trough the minds of former executioner of the militant regime in Indonesia. The documentary shows us the life of Anwar Congo, a now famous former militant executioner who has a celebrity status in Indonesia. Through the re-enactment of the killings and acts against humanity in the documentary, we get to get inside the head of a psychopath. Josuah gives Anwar the opportunity to re-enact the acts he has committed in Hollywood fashion. For Anwar Hollywood cinema has been the source of inspiration and vision to deal with executions and state of mind in his days in the death squats. It is clear from his statements that he finds himself in the movies he watched while he was an executioner. In this example the Hollywood cinema is a catalyst for the behaviour of Anwar. He recalls going to the cinema to see an Elvis Presley movie, this movie made him feel happy, and mad him kill and execute “happy” Could this movie and others like it influence a man to a certain point where he lives like the movies? The documentary clearly explains this, with the examples of re-enactment of the killings in a language that Anwar understands. Hollywood. Through these re-enactments Anwar travels deeper in his own understanding of himself and he questions his former acts. [i would question this-- maybe Anwar is incapable of understanding his actions- he seems to only understand the suffering of others when he re-enacts it] It is almost like he can’t understand anything about himself, only when it is recorder and played back to him, and even then there is doubt. This brings the questions if he is not only a victim of really bad choices and ideological influences or just a psychopath. [Or both? How are his actions justified ideologically throughout the film? Please unpack these issues a little more] Enjoy Poverty! takes us to Congo where the director Renzo Martens show us one of the greatest export products of Congo: Poverty. He takes us on a trip to the villages connected to the plantages that harvest the land for export products. Quite soon in the documentary it is clear that the people who work at those plantages are very poor, and that their situation can’t be helped. From there on out Martens goes on out to explain that the natives should embrace their poverty and use it for their gain. He states that the biggest export from congo is poverty and that they should exploit that. For example he teaches them how to use photo cameras to take pictures of dying children en dead people. He gives them a crash course in how to get the best pictures from harsh situations. They visit a medic station where they photograph a doctor who shows where the child is hurt and malnourished. From there on he tries to get the pictures published and the photographers financed by foreign papers and magazines. But he fails and the natives are stuck with a new ideology that they can’t use or understand. Throughout the documentary more examples follow and the idea strikes Martens that the Congolise couldn’t grasp the idea of enjoying poverty. [but they do get the idea, what they don't get is access to the channels that mediate that information- images they make; so what does the fact that the congo photographers can't actually sell their own images of poverty tell us?] Even when Martens imports a huge sign that says “Enjoy Poverty (please)” the Congolise react with more enthusiasm for the bright lights than for the message it portrays.[<<but is this sign for the Congolise? i think it is speaking to another constituency - Please unpack these issues a little more, you seem to be regarding this as a colonialist, ethnographic film where 'the natives' are under educated about their condition-- we see throughout that the congilise are in poverty and there seems to be an economical structure that will keep them like this- please adress this issue and how Renzo addresses it in the film] Conclusion:

Notes & Quotes (draft only)

 In developing a thesis of ideology and its function, Žižek makes two intertwined arguments:[8]

1. He begins with a critique of Marx's concept of ideology (as described in The German Ideology) in which people are beholden to false consciousness that prevents them from seeing how things really are. Žižek argues that people's deepest motives are unconscious and that ideology functions as a justification for the existing social order. That is, reality is constructed through ideology. 2. However, the Real is not equivalent to the reality experienced by subjects as a meaningfully ordered totality. For Žižek, the Real names points within the ontological fabric, knitted by the hegemonic systems of representation and reproduction, that nevertheless resist full inscription into its terms and that may as such attempt to generate sites of active political resistance. Harpham calls Žižek's style "a stream of nonconsecutive units arranged in arbitrary sequences that solicit a sporadic and discontinuous attention."[33] O'Neill concurs: "a dizzying array of wildly entertaining and often quite maddening rhetorical strategies are deployed in order to beguile, browbeat, dumbfound, dazzle, confuse, mislead, overwhelm, and generally subdue the reader into acceptance.

ACT OF KILLING -> http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2014/01/07/3119171/act-killing-director-joshua-oppenheimer/

Now, Anwar said many times, described many times to me, how he was inspired, gathered methods of killing from watching Hollywood movies. But I had to hear that five, six, maybe ten times before it sunk in that that was what he was saying. [That's not to say that Hollywood movies cause violence.] I think that’s too simple by far. I filmed 30, 35 perpetrators in the countryside who were killing quite easily without watching movies. They were distancing themselves from the inherently traumatic act of killing by drinking alcohol…Interestingly, the most recent example Anwar gives of movies influencing his behavior was an Elvis Presley movie, he talked about dancing out of the cinema and killing happily, drunk not on alcohol but by the cinematic identification with Elvis. This is a film about the effects of denial. About the corrupting effects of denial, about what happens when we build a normality on the basis of violence…I think that Anwar, somehow the real issue then is about escapism and denial and fantasy and how we use stories to escape from our most bitter and painful truths, how we lie to ourselves to justify our actions. Cinema is the great storytelling medium of modernity, so cinema is implicated in that.

I think fundamentally, I had to make a decision really on whether this was a film about the past or the present. And The Act Of Killing is a film about the present. And it’s a film about the abuse of historical narrative in the present. It’s a film about the role of an unresolved traumatic past of keeping people terrorized in the present and enabling all sorts of corruption and further evil, [like] the extortion in the marketplaces. It’s a film about the life of an unresolved traumatic past in the present. But it’s not a film about that past.