‘the victors stood guard over an empire of rats’

last night he watched november an estonian film in the black and white folk horror mode - enjoyable but slight. the dead come to visit once a year on all souls (dressed in a stainless white). they need to be fed and given a sauna. it is possible to make assemblages of farm tools and then to do a deal with the devil at the crossroads to bring them life.

ben has been mulling over la jetée again. horsemouth sees it ths way. the arrow of time (like the magnetic field) has turned, once we were powering into the future (for good or ill) on the express train of capitalism, now we have turned round and have become aware of the carnage that brought us to this moment (with horror we watch the wreckage pile up behind us).



the gesture to turn around has its origin not in the ecological collapse, nor entirely in our growing awareness of our ‘progressive’ history as a history of barbarism but in an unpeeling of the suture of the arrow of time with the arrow of progress. we have become cautious about these assemblages.

‘nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. later on they do claim remembrance when they show their scars. that face he had seen was to be the only peacetime image to survive the war. had he really seen it?’

we turn round and find the origins blurry, we find memory selectively picking the scenes for their importance to us now. photography helps us, film helps us - for we can look again. for some it would be enough to turn forward again to contemplate the sunny vistas of solar farms, the cold voids of interstellar travel, to accelerate and jump the shark of ecological collapse into outer space.

for others the golden heroic years of capitalism (the hauptmotor) are over, it’s damage to the planet is integral to it and can no longer be ignored. in the west capitalism itself has collapsed from space exploration to doing up shops in shoreditch and a weary and peevish rent seeking (the grubbing of profit before it even happens). 

our future is that of the estonian peasants - great material poverty in the ruins of technology. our future is not in glorious interstellar technicolour but in the black and white of snow and mud (well maybe not snow). they are showing snowpiercer on tv soon. the train charges through the snow of a frozen world, a complete world and class society of itself, at the head the controller, the decadent party goers, at the back the surplus people.
thanks to john for leaving the copy of november. antony for showing snowpiercer one time (years ago), thanks to kate for having taken him to see la jetée (decades ago at the ICA), a benefactor (SparkzMxzXZ) for having uploaded it to youtube.