McKenzie Wark - The Thirst for Annihilation; Georges Bataille and Virtulent Nihilism

hIm, Duaam, ell, New Questions of British Cinema, Britisb FUm I,utlhde, Loruloo, 1992ISBN () 851703224. vi + 119/Jp. DlstrlbMle4 by lrutltuJQ lJRIversl'Y Press. You do these reviews to get free books, but every now and then something happens chat you didn't count on. Since I'm drawn to the past almost everywhere, I don't have a lot of interest in contemporary Brirtsh cinema but a week ago MIA sent me a copy of this sort of British Cinema Now NOW co review. Should I do it? Consider the chapter headings: 'The Issue of National Cinema and British Film Producers'; 'Subsidies, Audiences, Producers'; 'Seven Deadly Mychs: Film Policy and the BFI, a Personal Lexicon': 'Changing Conditions of Independent Production in the UK'; 'Low-Budget British Production: A Producer's Account': 'Production Strategies in the UK'; 'Independent Disitribution in the UK: Problems and Proposals'; 'Marketing Issues in the Film Industry Today'; 'Researching the Market for British Films'. And the writer's list contains a few names I think I know: Colin McCabe, Julian Petley, Geoffrey (The Cheque Is Probably Not In The Mail) Nowell-Smith. Definitely too good {Q pass on cosomeone more qualified. I can tell before the first page that this is a Really Useful Book: all anyone seriously has to know about the Porn's film industry circa 1992. More than that, it furnishes an exemplary outline for other surveys of the State of a Nation's Film Business: it is a yardstick with which one may be able to flog Others. There are no textual analyses here, but there are a lor of facts and figures. And virtually every line Invites speculations about similar areas in Australia. For example: 'the contempt for television and the emphasis on the auteur are the two dominanr problems for European cinema and ... they amount (0 the same thing: a determination to ignore audiences' (p27); 'the fate of British production is closely linked to the state of independent distribution and, to a lesser extent, exhibition' (p76); 'it is quite possible to conceive of a national cinema which is nationally specific without being either nationalist or attached to homegenising myths of national identity' (pl6). This is not lust a book worth getting free. It is one worth buying. - William D Routt No 75 - FebRlSry t995 Petrie, 1JIu;Ican, ed, Cinema and the Realms of Enchantment l.edures, Seminarsand Essays by Marina Warner and Others, Brldsb Film Instltule, 1993. ISBN 0 85170 405O. pb, 144pp. DIsIrlb..ud by lrutltllUl Urdverstty Press. This stimulating collection of essays exploring how the fairy tale has intluenced the cinema is parr of the BPI working papers series. It includes three essays by Marina Warner, The Uses ofBncbantment, Through a Childs' Eyes and Women Against Women In the Old Wives' Tale in which she discusses the close relationship between cinema and fantasy, the presence of children as mediating consciousness in film, the theme of transformation and the issue of misogyny. Each essay develops one particular theme in relation to a wide range of films, including dassical tides by Renoir, Vigo and Cocteau as well as more contemporary films. Her analysis of the different screen adaptations of Cinderella, for instance, provides interesting comment on changing social mores. Warner's selection and juxtaposition of titles is often as illuminating as her symbolic reading of these. The other essays apply some of Warner's key issues to specific films. such as the theme of transformation in TheCat People, its sequel, The Curse of the Cat People, and Batman Returns. This inspiring book opens up new perspectives for the analysis of film and television and is well worth reading. - Kari Hanel Rkbardson, MkblU4 Georaes Batallle. Routkdge, LoruIon, 199t ISBN 0415098414. L41Id, Nld, The Thlrst for Aruillillatlon: Georges BataWe and VlruIent NIhJllsm, RoulletIge, Lon.", 1992, ISBN 041505608 X DIstrlb..ud by .be lAw BooII lAmptmy. If the academy can recuperate Georges Bataille and make him respectable, chen anything is possible. His writings from the 1920s to the 1950s defy genre, classification and very often taste. Which is exactly what makes them such a seductive object for more restrained and proper scholars. Barallle is something of a missing link between the late romantic aspect of the surrealist movement and so-called poststructuralism, As I've argued before, a more sensible genealogy would categorise Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard as postsurreallst, Each certainly owes a lot to 169 ~ "; 'I , III rJir l !

Bataille. including the latter's Inrense fascination and hostiliry towards Hegel. A great many misunderstandings about Hegel find their way into contemporary thinking via poststructuralist (rnisjreadings of Bataille on Kojeve on Hegel. The reason this matters is that Hegel's phenomenology of recognition is perhaps the first philosophy of communication chat treats communication as a problem rather than a given that is premised on a dialectic with the ocher. and hence does not lapse into solipsism. Phenomenologies of perception and recognition have been out of vogue during the long(ish) reign of semiotics and screen theory, but with screen based media being edged out by interactive video games and the like, we may have need to investigate these problems afresh. Richardson, who has also edited a collection of Bataille's surrealist era writings for Verso, offers a conventional and conventionalising account of Bataille. It runs the risk of making him just a little too acceptable, but he's a better introduction to Bataille than Denis Hollier's whimsical book Against Architecture. A good companion to Richardson is Nick Land's extraordinary Thirst for Annihilation. Land tries to do justice to the radical heterogeneity of Batallle's texts and the truly transgressive form of his thinking. He puts him in the company ofthe pessimists, principally Freud and, in an inspired move, Schopenhauer. - McKenzie Wark lAne, Richard, The Golden Age of Australlan Radlo J)rama, 1~3-1960, MeOxn"."e University Press, 1m. ISBN ()552 845568, xx + j'7pp, 149.95 bb. It is common nowadays to hear the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s referred to as 'The Golden Years 'of radio. These were the years when, for most Australians, radio was a primary source of entertainment, but it is fair to say that it is mostly memories of radio plays and serials which excite this nostalgia. The public'S appetite, especially for serials, was seemingly insatiable. It is no exaggeration to say that from the mid 1930s the perceived need to mass produce and distribute serials nationwide was one of the strongest forces driving the development of the organisational structures and technical innovations of commercial broadcasting. However, it should be remembered that 170 'Golden Age' is a term commonly signifying nostalgia for a vanished era, rarely recognised as such when it is flourishing. Thus it is a sad fact that little attention was paid chen to making a systematic record of the production of radio drama. Now when there is a revived interest in our broadcasting history, we find that much of the documentation has been lost. Fortunately, a great reservoir of information still exists in the memories of chose who worked in the industry, and in their scrapbooks and personal papers. Richard Lane was one of chose whose working life extended from the great days of radio drama well into television. and for whom so many of the major figures of those days were friends and colleagues. Few, therefore, could have been better placed to compile these significant biographies. The wealth of detail and telling anecdotal material would have made Lane's collection an Important work if for no other reason than that they preserved information rapidly disappearing. However, the biographies, as Lane has said, were orginally commissioned for a projected encyclopaedia of Australian music, radio and recorded sound, and when that did not eventuate he was able to explore a concept of 'history through biography'. The Go/den A,ge is not a history in the conventional sense of a strictly chronological sequence of events, with an analysis of causes and effects. Some sense of chronology is achieved by the division into rwo parts: 1923-1940, when the technology and institutions of broadcasting and the techniques of radio drama were being developed; and 1940-60, the time of flourishing and eventual decline. Further subdivisions are prefaced by fairly brief explanations of matters Lane perceived to be significant to the period. The comparative looseness of this arrangement has made it possible for Lane to reorganise the biographies more or less according to the time of the subjects' mature work; (his grouping facilitated the accumulation of detail of working lives and anecdotal material from which a reader (with some assiduity) could build up a picture of successive periods, and acquire some sense of the issues affecting the lives and careers of the people involved. Lane's book is all the more timely, however, because it appears in the midst of Media Informa~on AuSlralia