Chelsea the Cinéaste

  In  Eichmann in Jerusalem  (1963), Hannah Arendt attributes the criminal mind of Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann to a “sheer thoughtlessness - something by no means identical with stupidity…”  A Report on the Banality of Evil , which is the book’s subtitle, introduces a kind of evil - the worst conceivable kind in human history - that departs from the “radical evil” that is at the heart of Arendt’s  The Origins of Totalitarianism  (1951). Shortly after the publication of  Eichmann , Arendt wrote to philosopher Gershom Scholem:         […] I changed my opinion and do no longer speak of “radical evil.” […] It is        indeed my opinion now that now that evil is never “radical”, that it is only        extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension […]        It is “thought-defying”, as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth,        to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated       because there is nothing. That is

  In search of what he called an “astral America” in the early 1980s, Jean Baudrillard came upon its ultimate symbol - the desert: “ Desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.” This initial ecstasy soon gave way to sobering contemplation - of technology, the ravages of modernity, the vacuity of the American dream, the mindless luxury of civilisation…”All societies end up wearing masks,” Baudrillard pronounces, tying his observation in with the premise of his seminal work,  Simulacra and Simulation , published just a few years back, that “artifice is at the very heart of reality.”   Baudrillard’s Delphic prose, which comprises the book  America , is echoed in the strange, banal imagery of  3 Women  (1977). The locales were Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs - arid plains where spirit decayed and hopes foundered. As is frequently the case, the drab physical landscape triggers an inverse response from the psychological: like James Stewart’s

  The war between humans and nature is endless, with the victory of one implying the defeat of both. This rather frightening truth cannot be more understated, especially in light of today’s global environmental crisis, which seems all but irreversible. The prospect of restoring the supposed equilibrium we have with the natural world has at the most an equivocal basis: has humanity ever conformed to any state of existence other than itself?   In Roberto Rossellini’s  Stromboli  (1950), the first of the Bergman-Rossellini collaboration, the contrast is made starkly clear: the outsized ego of mankind versus the impregnable, and impenetrable, all-powerfulness of Mother Nature. Bergman played Karin, a Lithuanian exile dreaming of a better life but marrying an ex-POW fisherman out of desperate need to be released from the refugee camp. Her husband takes her back to his home, the volcanic island Stromboli, where a bemused Karin is greeted by its dour-faced people - mostly elders with a smatte

  The comparison of human eye to a camera is a well-worn trope in photography and cinema. In a photograph or film, the camera quite naturally stands for the artist’s gaze. As passive consumers, we do not normally question the validity of such equation: the camera’s mechanised functionality is presumed and taken for granted - it is only a tool. Another line of thought undertaken by, most prominently, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, hints at the complex roles the act of taking a photograph automatically assumes: “…the Photograph,” writes Barthes in  Camera Lucida , “is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity.” Every subject is an object in a photograph, and the lived moment captured and, accordingly, preserved. Time is especially a knotty matter here: it is ever-present but frozen at a particular juncture, at the past; anticipating an unestablished future, a sure course to death.   To see myself as “other”, as a stranger in a photograph, impl