Michelle Kent

Spotless

Crimes on mine!
Written moths and famed frozen
text: a brutal stabbing, dark street
corners where i made the alley his rest.
Amends leaned in to test his breath then
stole his last one.

The devil took my wrist and led
perfect conversation,
I told him these crimes were not mine.
He begged for my heart;
a puzzle piece apart…The arches were sawed-
off edges now.
I cut his throat with it,
and left it…
…among bricks and other deep crimsons

—–

New

If spontaneous had a spelling error, I’d revise.
But, these babbling shuffles please an unwanted audience,
so who’s to blame

Perception is the contraception for truth,
a useful tool for an ignorant
endeavour.
we’re leaving tomorrow, coincidentally.

waiting face to face entertains no more
than ignoring your cloudy smirk, so turn
Away.

An abrupt knock is the cue for me to unpack –
“fuck, I forgot our minds…”
He says “I told you so” through the windows
so I break every single one

—–

Michelle Kent is a Women’s and Sexuality Studies major who spends most of her time
drinking coffee and memorizing rap lyrics. She hopes to pursue a career in social work.

Amy Saunders

Looking for the love I had sought to seek – I have lost the tolerance in me.

I remember all the things I used to silence, all the reasons I felt out of time, out of place –
I’m pure defiance.

I catch myself praying to a hybrid: the evolution of my god, the evolution of my science.

And all the suns, I see them crying; the stars to vanquish with stones: the liars.

I have struggled with my heart and passion, settled out of court: my nutrition, my rations.

I had fed myself, my drink: compassion. But all the while, my stomach hastened.

My brain was drunk and merely fractioned. I hid myself in the darkest fashion.

To love thyself and know your madness: to see you with my eyes, half blindness.

I find myself confused and righteous: I find myself too heavy for lightness.

To believe that I am nothing great, but to see the world as a pure, beautiful slate:

But I have become everything I hate.

——

Amy Saunders is a student of Sexuality Studies at York University. Her essays and poetry
have been published in University of Guelphs’ Feminist Journal, as well as the literary arts
magazine, In My Bed.

Amee Lê

When the weather finally picked up for what’s considered a cool summer in Berlin, Lars von Trier came to Babylon, the city’s festival theater, to kick off a retrospective on his works and to hopefully find some redemption for his previous public appearance that had arguably cost the Danish director the 2011 Palme d’Or while having earned him the title ‘persona non grata’ first ever to be declared at the Cannes. I sacrificed the rare sunny afternoon toward the end of my internship in Berlin to line up in a packed lobby, with decreasing oxygen and increasing excitement, during the one hour leading up to the Q&A event.

Lars von Trier is notorious for his lack of mercy for the audience. Found in his films are some of the most psychologically difficult, if not disturbing, stories as well as visual images employed to tell them, habitually in a fairytale manner. Trier’s masterful use of the Brechtian distancing effect leaves no one innocent as watching a Trier film often forces one to face one’s own senses of greed, guilt, and despair. In Dogvile (2003), the first in Trier’s projected USA – Land of Opportunities trilogy (including Manderlay (2005) and to-be-completed Washington), during almost three hours of emotional and physical torture scenes, the audience will slowly be turned from a justified sympathizer to a bewildered accomplice in a horrid crime of revenge by the central character Grace. While asked about Dogville as a critique of a country he never set foot on, Trier explained that he had always been brought up to be against the US and the Vietnam War, and more blatantly, to feel nauseated every time America was mentioned as a great nation.

In 1995, inspired by the French New Wave of the 60s, Lars von Trier co-founded Dogme 95 with Thomas Vinterberg. The avant-garde movement was intended to render filmmaking more accessible by declaring manifestos that required on-location shooting with hand-held cameras, minimum to no editing and special effects, as well as non-credited directors. The movement produced many critically acclaimed films such as The Celebration (Dogme #1), The Idiots (Dogme #2), Julien Donkey-Boy (Dogme #6), and Kira’s Reason: A Love Story (Dogme #21). Trier, like other Dogme directors, admitted to having cheated on the principles of Dogme and is no longer making strictly Dogme films. When German newspaper Die Welt’s film editor Hanns-Georg Rodek confronted Trier about what the latter was thinking when he wrote in one of his manifestos that there should be more heterosexual films of, by, and for men, Trier dodged the issue by saying that manifestos were written just to be thrown away and giving nods to great ‘heterosexual films’ made by homosexual directors such as Fassbinder and Pasolini.

The topics of Trier as a provocateur and the recent Cannes incident unavoidably dominated the Q&A. The prologue of the auteur’s most controversial film yet Antichrist (2009) is perhaps one of the most poetic and perturbing pieces of hard-core porn that has ever graced the movie screen. It also validates Trier’s assertion that children are only props in his films. The film deals with Trier’s defined three stages of guilt – pain, grief, and despair. Once again, in response to the German film critic about provocation as an art form, Trier emphasized the importance of being rebellious. Having already confessed to being someone who was against everything, Trier argued that provocation while making people angry also made them think and reconsider things; and being provocative was about having an opinion and taking part in life. He admitted however that there was also bad provocation. This led back to what had happened at Cannes and before Cannes, at Trier’s mother’s deathbed. Trier had only learned about who his real father was shortly before his mother passed away. He had believed during most of his life that he was Jewish, only to find out that he was of German descent. This provided the pretext for the awful joke Trier made at Cannes this year that he had always thought he was a Jew but it turned out that he was a Nazi. Trier then dug himself deeper into the grave by commenting that he sympathized with Hitler. For this, Trier is now banned from Cannes. A perhaps intentionally unwise member from the Q&A audience asked Trier to recontextualize the N-word now that he was in Germany, which received a great boo from everyone else. Trier redeemed himself with the Berlin audience by acknowledging his foolishness (“…but I’m only a human,” he added), claiming that we were all a bit Nazis, and stressing the importance of not making a taboo out of the subject. The speech’s resonance with the audience was confirmed by a hearty round of applause.

Besides the reputation as a sadist for placing exceeding demands on people working on his films, Lars von Trier is also accused of being a misogynist for having often made martyrs out of his female protagonists. Ironically, under his direction, there have been three Best Actress wins at the Cannes including Dancer in the Dark’s Bjork, Antichrist’s Charlotte Gainsbourg, and even Melancholia’s Kirsten Dunst despite the aforementioned unfortunate event at the film’s press conference. Melancholia (2011) too contains a visually breathtaking prologue perfectly set to the music of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde’s prelude. The title, also the name of a blue planet in the film, is not only an obvious reference to depression, with which Trier himself is not unfamiliar, but an encompassing emblem for a sense of despair in us all as well. The sickening dance of Death between the planets Earth and Melancholia is sped up in the film by the human tragicomedies of empty rituals (in this case, the most expensive wedding a bride can have) and failed relationships (Trier seems to blame the parents for this one – we either inherit or are made messed up by our parents). The disheartening theme can be forgiven, however, for the visual decadence of stunning imagery created by either quoting or ‘paraphrasing’ the many classical paintings including Pieter Brueghel’s The Hunters in the Snow (1565), Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1852), and Edvard Munch’s The Dance of Life (1899). The director of Babylon Timothy Grossmann awkwardly commented on Melancholia that he never knew dying could be so pretty. For me personally and with all of the Trier films I have seen, there is always a Nietzschean sense of liberation in Trier’s acceptance of fallible humanity.

Commenting on his next film Nymphomaniac, Trier perfected his role as the entertainer of the day by stating that the film was made out of his deep respect for female sexuality but “I’m just saying it because you won’t see it in the film.” Human, all too human!

All the film titles mentioned in this article, except for Melancholia, which will premiere in Toronto at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 17, 2011, can be found at the Sound and Moving Image Library, Scott Library.

Hadiyya Mwapachu

Mountains That Take Wing: Angela Davis & Yuri Kochiyama – A Conversation on Life, Struggles & Liberation is a documentary that features conversations in 1996 and 2008 between activists Angela Davis and Yuri Kochiyama.

One of the parallels that Davis and Kochiyama share is that their introduction into activism was a result of the social conditions that structured their lives. The film emphasizes the intersection of family and political history. Davis cites as great influences her mother’s involvement in the NAACP in the 1920s and support for Communism. The violence perpetrated by white citizen groups and the Klu Klax Klan, which accompanied segregation in the South, resulted in an atmosphere of social terror. Davis discusses how her earliest memories include hearing bombs and the burning of the church where she took part in an interracial discussion group. Her experiences are discussed in tandem with Kochiyama’s depiction of spending years in a Japanese internment camp and how this act of government enforcement and curtailing of civil rights led to a change of perception regarding the practice of freedom, justice, and equality in the United States.

One of the documentary’s persistent themes is how intrinsically the struggle for social justice is tied to personal location and the witnessing of social disparities. Kochiyama discusses how living in Harlem led to an awareness of the ardent discrimination enacted on Black and Hispanic communities, specifically in the absence of jobs. This led to her participation in mass demonstrations. Davis was a member of the Student Non-Violence Co-Coordinating Committee, which focused on constructing a social movement in California. Within these discussions, the role of activism within education is prevalent. Kochiyama speaks of the influence of the text The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual by Harold Cruse, which was not widely taught at the time. It is striking that for both Davis and Kochiyama, education structures were influenced by social opposition that was dictated by the students in contrast with being governed by the administration. Both examples display how education can serve projects that emphasize social liberation through both the acts of protest and the promotion of knowledge.

The documentary focuses on the role of trans-racial and transnational social organizing. Kochiyama tells of organizing a meeting between civil rights icon Malcolm X with survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb attacks. The meeting took place in Kochiyama’s apartment in New York. Kochiyama describes her continual dialogue with the activist leader, which took place largely in the form of postcards that he sent from nine countries. Davis and Kochiyama consider how depictions of Malcolm X’s legacy often limit the international significance he had, specifically his collaboration with Asian movements. One of the most revelatory examples of this is the omission of Kochiyama’s presence during Malcolm X’s assassination in the film about his life by Spike Lee. Davis notes that the film would have been different had it included the photograph of Kochiyama sitting next to Malcolm X’s body after he was shot. Kochiyama also notes the absence of the chapters on his visits to the newly independent states in Africa from the biography by Alex Haley. Specific characterizations of Malcolm X have obfuscated his work to build transnational solidarity movements, as well as his struggle against colonialism in its myriad forms. The women note how Malcolm X envisioned the struggle of Vietnam as being part of a struggle for Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism within an Internationalist activist movement. By emphasizing the cross-racial ties that Malcolm X inspired and built, the film works to recuperate the lack of visual representation surrounding these issues. It also celebrates and strengthens feminist perspectives of his legacy by portraying ties between his work and the work of activist women.

The role of women within social movements is the documentary’s most dynamic theme. The film explores how the participation of women central to the civil rights movement is often obscured and subjugated. According to Davis, “many people did not want to make connections between race, gender, and class.” She argues that male leaders are celebrated in contrast with women who “did the real work.” The film interlaces archival footage of female leaders alongside Davis’s reflections, thus giving the audience a visual history of the women who have been marginalized throughout social history. One of the most transformative points is Davis’s view that in order to encourage young people to join movements, you have to “legitimatize the role of women” within the past movements. Both Kochiyama and Davis express the importance of regarding the historical role that women of color had in constructing cross-racial, feminist networks.

The intersection of different struggles is the film’s most vital refrain, evident in the exploration of cross-racial and national solidarity movements across history. The women refer to Black soldiers who, struck by the brutality against Filipino citizens during the American occupation, joined members of the Filipino Guerrillas. This event would have been lost to history without the reporting of Black news writers. Through the use of archival cartoons and photographic evidence, the film depicts how these events of rebellion against the state mandate forged acts of collaboration. Before Davis and Kochiyama’s time, national colored unions were vocal against the Asian Exclusion Immigration Act, and grassroots activist Ho Chi Minh of Harlem supported the Marcus Garvey movement in Chicago. Historical constructions of the time, however, often fall short in scope and nuance. Davis argues that some stories surrounding campaigns linked to the past “are not recorded.” The film gives testimony to multiple struggles by historicizing the work of Davis and Kochiyama as being an integral part of diverse oppositional struggles throughout social history. It thus gives the audience a sense of collective history, which both enlivens and radicalizes official narrations of historical events.

The prison industrial complex and its role as both a racist and repressive force plays a central role within the film. In 1969 Davis was prohibited from teaching at the University of California due to a McCarthyite clause preventing members of the Communist Party from lecturing. Davis sees parallels between fighting for the right to teach and the struggle of George Jackson, who was fighting for his freedom within a justice system governed by racist disparities and politics. The film depicts how many political prisoners were targeted during this time and how this was part of a legacy of individuals involved in social movements being detained due to their activism. After Davis was arrested for participating in George Jackson’s legal case, she began to establish a way to use her voice to bring the issue of prisons to the forefront. The film explores how the political campaign to free Davis was centered around bridging a movement that was trans racial, across gender, class, national, and political divides. Davis expresses how her first campaign to free a political prisoner was the international campaign to free Nelson Mandela. The campaign to free her is a concrete example of how cognizance of inequality within the justice system can lead people to see how prisons and detention centers work to silence oppositional voices.

Davis contends that more government funds are spent on building prisons as opposed to education. She describes how they serve as tools for “surveillance and discipline” and are inextricably linked to the strengthening of corporate economies. The film shows Davis speaking to groups about the movement to abolish prisons due to the high number of people of colour incarcerated and used for cheap labour. She addresses the need for creating a new vocabulary, one which disrupts normative discussions around crime. She introduces the notion of ‘environmental crime:’ inadequate living conditions and government appeasement in cases of disasters, which Kochiyama elaborates on in reference to Hurricane Katrina.

Kochiyama works to shed attention on the sexual imprisonment that Asian women faced during the Second World War by Japanese soldiers. She rebukes the term ‘comfort women’ and describes how these women from different countries were placed in forced sexual labour during wartime. The film depicts how women demonstrate every day before the Japanese Embassy in Korea, calling for an apology and reparations. Kochiyama states that one of the most abhorrent aspects of these historical events is that the imprisonment of these women was left out of the Tokyo War crimes Tribunal. The film displays footage of Kochiyama rallying in front of groups, proclaiming that “the most powerful weapon for women is to go out and tell the truth.” The importance of testimony, specifically of formulating a vocabulary that builds campaigns, is a structuring theme throughout the film. Davis notes how the “proliferation of prisons is the main drive for empire,” and both activists discuss the overarching influence of US nationalism in prisons at home and abroad, from Black sites to the practice of rendition. They speak of strategies to foster a sense of identification between people from different locations who are all affected by acts of aggression, in order to strengthen transnational movements that work against the threat of wars.

Mountains That Take Wing can be found at Sound and Moving Library, Scott Library. The title will also be screened at Rebels with a Cause, OPIRG York’s first-ever DisOrientation film festival followed by a panel discussions with the film’s directors C.A. Griffith and H.L.T. Quan.