The Intimacies of Four Continents

"'New World' people of the British, French, Dutch, and Spanish colonized Americas created the conditions for modern humanism, despite the disavowal of these conditions in the liberal political philosophy on which it is largely based. Colonial racial classifications and an international division of labor emerged coterminously as parts of a genealogy that were not exceptional to, but were constitutive of, that humanism. Freedom was constituted through a narrative dialectic that rested simultaneously on a spatialization of the unfree as exteriority and a temporal subsuming of enslavement as internal difference or contradiction. The 'overcoming' of internal contradiction resolves in freedom within the modern Western political sphere through displacement and elision of the coeval conditions of slavery and indentureship in the Americas. In this sense modern humanism is a formalism that translates the world through an economy of affirmation and forgetting within a regime of desiring freedom. The affirmation of the desire for freedom is so inhabited by the forgetting of its conditions of possibility, that every narrative articulation of freedom is haunted by its burial, by the violence of forgetting. What we know as 'race' or 'gender' are the traces of this modern humanist forgetting. They reside within, and are constitutive of, the modern narrative of freedom but are neither fully determined by nor exhausted by its ends. They are the remainders of the formalism of affirmation and forgetting."

Lisa Lowe, "The Intimacies of Four Continents"
Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History

三八

非三八不可。

人一生當中一定要來這麼一次的。

part four, 6

"As we climbed, the air grew cooler and the Indian girls on the road wore shawls over their heads and shoulders. They hailed us desperately; we stopped to see. They wanted to sell us little pieces of rock crystal. Their great brown, innocent eyes looked into ours with such soulful intensity that not one of us had the slightest sexual thought about them; moreover they were very young, some of them eleven and looking almost thirty. 'Look at those eyes!' breathed Dean. They were like the eyes of the Virgin Mother when she was a child. We saw in them the tender and forgiving gaze of Jesus. And they started unflinching into ours. We rubbed our nervous blue eyes and looked again. Still they penetrated us with sorrowful and hypnotic gleam. When they talked they suddenly became frantic and almost silly. In their silence they were themselves. 'They've only recently learned to sell these crystals, since the highway was built about ten years back--up until that time this entire nation must have been silent!'

看得見的城市│舊金山 2012.8.4

(原刊載於觀察者：藝術生態觀測站，家長筆記：郭任峰│看得見的城市)

風景明信片是觀看城市的一種方式。(雖然這種觀看方式裡，城市大約就兩種模樣：壯闊的鳥瞰圖或是著名景點)

明信片裡城市一覽無遺，那種超廣角與深焦構築出的壯美，和地圖上看相去不遠。明信片裡的城市有街道與建築的大小、線條、形狀、光點，只是沒有人。

2012台北電影節: 山城裡的麵包香 (Historias que so existem quando lembradas, 2011)

《山城裡的麵包香》原文海報

雖然外片的中文譯名常常很讓人崩潰，但偶而會有神來之筆。今年台北電影節引進的法國、巴西、阿根廷三國合資作品《山城裡的麵包香》，中文片名完全脫逸原文片名，卻巧妙直指電影本身充滿詩意的靜謐與沉靜的視覺與敘事美感。電影的第一幕，是漆烏黑暗中，逐漸滲進一絲幽微的燭光，白髮老嫗提著煤油燈走近，站到平台前開始準備食材。

堪堪滿百分鐘的片長，由這樣緩慢的片斷一一銜接，演繹居民盡是老人的巴西山中小鎮時光。千篇一律的日常事務，每日反覆的相同對話也有如例行公事；花白髮絲，臉上斑駁的褶痕。彷彿時間從很久以前的某天停止，便一直是這樣了。

我們甚至一度無法辨識電影中的時空。直到年輕旅人的出現。從此例行生活開始有了改變，甚至畫面都開始變得生動活潑。

2012台北電影節: 秋光奏鳴曲 (Höstsonaten, 1978)

(是，我確實是等到今年的台北電影節，才終於和柏格曼的這部名作相逢。不過能在大銀幕上看電影，怎麼說都比在電視螢幕上看DVD強。)

《秋光奏鳴曲》有柏格曼作品中極浪漫的片名，但其殘酷令人不忍卒睹的程度卻或許是數一數二的。這部片的本事是發生在一個以青年夫妻為主的家庭中一天之內的故事；青年夫婦邀請妻子的新寡母親前來同住，母女多年未見如今相逢看似熱切融洽，卻暗藏多年未決而一觸即發的不解、誤解、以及種種的怨懟。這個聚首之日也因之成為攤牌決裂之時。

電影青春，校園熱血？

電影青春，校園熱血？

郭任峰(本文原刊載於觀察者-藝術生態觀察站)

《十加十》〈唱歌男孩〉

「又到了鳳凰花開的季節，莘莘學子們即將…」這等老梗，妳我一生當中至少要聽過三四遍。初聽有無限憧憬，再聽躊躇滿志，三聽略有感傷，聽到第四遍就是陳腔濫調了。

但老梗總有新玩法，就像校園電影玩到爛還是青春期荷爾蒙過盛的劇碼，但怎麼玩就是永遠有人捧場，而且玩得夠聰明夠芭樂還能成為傳頌一時的世代符碼。寶島去年就爆紅了《那些年，我們一起追的女孩》，一時間全台美眉都逼問身邊的男生自己是不是她心中的沈佳宜。《那些年》旋風般成為集體膜拜的文化商品，讓洋溢青春熱血、文藝浪漫的校園電影再次風靡台灣。