'dead the ends' (a man out of time)

so horsemouth is anxiously watching the red skies over the seaside towns (hurricane season apparently).

 ‘today, only the person who no longer believes in the happy ending, only he who has consciously renounced it, is able to live.’ - ernst junger, the glass bees (1957).


Trailer - Dead the Ends (2017) from Benedict Seymour on Vimeo.


horsemouth is back from watching ben seymour’s film dead the ends at rich mix on sunday (it premiered at the ICA during the week so he’s one of the first to see it).

dead the ends is a film of the type la jetee/ twelve monkeys/ loopers/ the jacket - a journey into the past/ future, a time-travel made possible by the power of film, a journey repeatedly made in the hope of making things right (eventually understanding dawns that it can/cannot be made right). the itchy glitching loops of gifs replace the static  photographic images of la jetee, replace the hollywood story-telling of twelve monkeys/ loopers/ the jacket. the voice over remains (indeed it has become rachel baker).

the name of the central character has migrated from the director of la jetee, chris marker, via angry brigade bomber john barker, to a john marker (later his name will be stolen by an undercover police officer) - he is a man out of time.

the first two missions in time - to bomb biba (like the angry brigade), to inform or assassinate economist michael hudson - fail, the final one - to expose the police spy (and namethief - like recent police spies) fails but it inaugurates a ghost - a ghost who haunts the murder of mark duggan by the police in tottenham in 2011. this is where the movie finds its hope in thelondon wide 2011 riots following mark duggan’s murder - riots crucially untheorised by the communist left and unpredicted by them.

of course one could remark that despite the riots things have not in fact got any better. that the process of gentrification is hollowing out the inner cities, that the program of austerity has in fact largely been politically successful (even if it is simultaneously an economic disaster) - that money, resources and value have continued to flow from the poor to the rich, that indeed the gentrification of tottenham and hackney is part of that looting by capitalism.

the criticism of capital here is that it is no longer the heroic capital of the early marx and engels but that it has adopted the cultural logic of its romantic critics (if nothing else) and become stuck in an endless repeat and collage of the styles of the past - a critique popularised by mark fisher, owen hatherley and the like (and here focused in a repeat of the angry brigade’s bombing of biba). also that capital has itself become a time machine in its divorcing of itself from its creation in labour (in the rejection of the gold standard at bretton woods, in a march away from production), in its endless cycles of debt (and occasional forgiveness) to fuel demand. indeed it is pointed out that the arguments of critic of capitalism michael hudson on this point were in fact instrumentalised (his book was on US aid and its terrible consequences for developing countries was in fact read as a how-to manual by the state department).

it is a film in search of a happy ending (and yet which knows enough brecht and adorno to know it should not be in search of one).





what we also have is a critique of the left and its claim to be able to forsee revolution and call for the correct action to bring it on. in his post film talk ben mentioned the palindromic structure of debord’s in girum imus nocte (et consumimur igni) - that at the end of the film calls for the film to be watched again - indeed as he struggled with this formulation he found other voices echoing his in repeating it (he found himself a voice within a voice - to echo foucault).


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in the glass bees (by ernst junger) there is another man out of time - the author lived to the age of 102 through germany’s arguably most turbulent century -  his character, a cavalry officer, is arguably an extinct type condemned to wander around after his social death.

he confronts a world of cellular automata (the glass bees of the title), a world of technological determinism and culture hero engineers (simultaneously disney and bill gates), a world that has replaced horses with tanks and is still moving forward.

the character survives (at least for a while) by accepting the new world in which he finds himself. maybe the reprieve is only temporary but the book gives us that hope in the everyday as an ending. 

on the way to the cinema horsemouth bumped into his old friend the reverend brian - they went for a quick pint in the pub where one of brian’s daughters now works and they looked out together over victoria park wonderfully transformed (gentrified). glass bees flew about cleaning surfaces, picking up litter and rousting the poor from doorways, a larger bee surveilled the terrace looking to see who might require another beer soon.