Jakob's Blog

Diesen Samstag, den 17. Juni um 23 Uhr kann man im "vor wien" in der skalitzer str. 41(direkt beim u-bahnhof görlitzer park) erstmals den Fußballzombie-Kurzfilm "Die Nacht der lebenden Idioten" bewundern, in den ich am Rande als Kreativkraft eingebunden war.

wer morgen keine Zeit hat:

22. Juni im Videokeller in der Kastanienallee 85, um 21 uhr
20. Juni im Durchs Fenster 21 Uhr
24. Juni in der Möbelfabrik so ab 23 Uhr
29. Juni im Videokeller in der Kastanienallee 85, um 21 uhr
9. Juli in der NGBK

Würde mich freuen, viele Bekannte Gesichter zusehen!

Hier noch mal meine Gedanken zum Silent-Hill-Film im klassischen Rezensions-Format:

Silent Hill
USA 2006

Bei ihren lebensgefährlichen Schlafwandel-Ausflügen kommt der neunjährigen Sharon immer wieder ein Name über die Lippen: Silent Hill. Bald findet ihre Adoptivmutter Rose heraus, dass es sich um eine Geisterstadt handelt, die vor 30 Jahren verlassen wurde, als sich ein unter ihr liegendes Kohleflöz entzündet hat und die Stadt in giftigen Dämpfen ersticken ließ. Rose beschließt, mit Sharon nach Silent Hill zu fahren, um den Schrecken, die sie plagen, ein für alle Mal auf den Grund zu gehen.
In Silent Hill angekommen, wird Rose von ihrer Tochter getrennt. Asche regnet in dünnen Flöckchen auf sie herab, während sie durch die verlassenen Straßen irrt. Plötzlich ertönt eine Sirene, und mit ihr bricht die Dunkelheit herein - in der sich grausige Kreaturen regen. Schon bald muss Rose erfahren, dass die Bürger von Silent Hill von einer schrecklichen Schuld gezeichnet sind - und dass Sharon zutiefst in die Geschichte der Stadt verstrickt ist ...

Silent Hill ist die Filmadaption einer inzwischen vierteiligen Survival-Horror-Computerspielreihe, erzählt inhaltlich allerdings eine eigenständige Geschichte, die vor allen Dingen Motive aus den ersten beiden Teilen aufnimmt. Die gute Nachricht vorweg: Unter allen Computerspiel-Verfilmungen dürfte Silent Hill bislang die gelungenste sein - was freilich viel heißt.
Zuerst einmal handelt es sich erfreulicherweise weit eher um einen klassischen Horrorfilm als um einen Action-Streifen, dessen Qualitäten und Gewicht ganz und gar auf seiner bizarren, erschreckenden Bilderwelt beruhen. Dabei werden die Elemente betont langsam aufeinander aufgebaut: Von nebligen Straßen geht es in verschimmelte Keller und schließlich zu ersten Begegnungen mit dem fleischgewordenen Grauen. Die auftauchenden Kreaturen sind größtenteils den Spielvorlagen entnommen und entsprechend gelungen. Fast alle haben eine symbolische Dimension: halbverbrannte Kinder und ein Henker mit Metallschädel sind nur die offensichtlichsten Beispiele in einem Film, der sich um die Themen Mutterschaft, Schuld und Sühne dreht. Schauwerte bietet der Film damit über Gebühr, zumindest wenn man sich für blutige Wände, verwachsenes Fleisch und spastisch zuckende Zombiewesen begeistern kann - denn tatsächlich verleiht der Film all seinen Abscheulichkeiten erstaunlichen Faszinationswert.
Auch Spannung vermag der Film zu erzeugen: am stärksten im Mittelteil, wenn Rose auf der panischen Flucht vor den Ausgeburten der Höllenstadt auf der Schultoilette dem „Janitor“ begegnet, der gelungensten Kreatur des Films. An anderen Stellen ergeben sich allerdings deutliche Längen: in einer Parallelhandlung sucht Roses Mann Chris nach ihr und bringt dabei zwar für die Zuschauer interessantes über die Hintergrundgeschichte in Erfahrung, die Handlung aber kein Stück voran. Zum Ende hin kriegt der geneigte Zuschauer dann noch eine ganze Menge buchstäblich saftigen und einfallsreichen Splatter geboten.
Mit allen genannten positiven Aspekten hat man schon mal einen recht anständigen Horrorfilm beisammen - weiter bringt es Silent Hill trotz großen Potentials dann leider auch nicht. Zum einen bleiben die Figuren allesamt ziemlich blass - bedauerlich, wenn man bedenkt, dass in den Spielen die Außenwelt von Silent Hill zum Teil das psychische Innenleben der Figuren abbildet. Diese Möglichkeit wurde hier weitestgehend verschenkt: Der Alptraum, durch den Rose taumelt, ist letztlich nicht ihr eigener. Schade ist auch, dass die zahlreichen weiblichen Hauptfiguren die ausgetretenen Pfade klassischer Frauenrollen kaum verlassen. Alle wichtigen Frauenfiguren sind auf irgendeine Art und Weise „Mütter“, die dann untereinander nur noch in gute, böse und nachlässige unterschieden werden. Eine Abkehr vom Klischee ist da bestenfalls in zaghaften Ansätzen spürbar ...
Zum anderen glänzen einige Dialoge leider durch seltene Dümmlichkeit: „Man hat schon immer gesagt, dass Silent Hill verflucht sei“ bemerkt da zum Beispiel messerscharf die Polizistin Cybil, nachdem sie gerade von einem zweieinhalbmetergroßen Henker mit Metallkopf und Riesenhackebeil gejagt worden ist. Was am Anfang ob der Sparsamkeit der Dialoge kaum stört, wird später ärgerlich, wenn eine christliche Sekte ins Spiel kommt, in deren Rängen Plattitüden versprüht werden wie in anderen Szenen das Filmblut. Als dramaturgische Ungeschicklichkeit kommt dann noch eine in rund fünf Minuten komprimierte Auflösung der Hintergrundgeschichte hinzu - hier hätte es dann doch ein wenig subtiler sein dürfen. Ein paar Szenen sind schließlich hart an der Grenze zur unfreiwilligen Komik - insbesondere die Krankenschwesterzombies dürften jeden Gruselfaktor verlieren, wenn man bei ihrem Anblick zufällig an das Video zum Michael-Jackson-Song „Thriller“ denkt. Das gleiche gilt für Elemente, die allzu deutlich aus der klassischen Computerspiel-Dramaturgie entlehnt sind: Wenn etwa Rose in einer Schule wahllos Schubladen öffnet und in der zweiten eine Taschenlampe findet, wenn sie ein Messer einsteckt, um kurz danach mit dessen Hilfe einen Geheimgang freizulegen, wenn sie auf Metallstreben über einen Abgrund balancieren muss oder wenn sie sich gar bemüht, sich den Lageplan des Krankenhauses einzuprägen. Einerseits sind diese Momente natürlich herzerwärmende Hommage an die Vorlage, andererseits wirken sie im Film doch recht hölzern und unglaubwürdig.
An anderen Stellen hat Regisseur Christopher Gans sich hingegen künstlerisch eindeutig richtig entschieden, indem er der Spielvorlage die Treue gehalten hat: einige der beängstigenderen Kameraeinstellungen werden versierten Spielern bekannt vorkommen, ebenso wie die ausgedehnten Abblenden. Die Filmmusik stammt schließlich zu weiten Teilen direkt aus den Spielen - glücklicherweise, denn die Silent-Hill-Spielesoundtracks lassen in Sachen Stimmung und Einfallsreichtum nichts zu wünschen übrig.

Insgesamt ist Silent Hill ein Film, der genug von seinem hohen Potential einlöst, um zufrieden zu stellen: hier wird eine durchaus intelligente Geschichte in wahrhaft höllischen Bildern erzählt. Wären Dramaturgie und Dialoge weniger holperig und die Figuren etwas ausgefeilter, wäre der Film ein Klassiker - so bietet er zwei weitesten Teils kurzweilige Stunden ungewöhnlichen Grauens.

My interview with Hal Duncan is now online at sfsite.com:

http://www.sfsite.com/06a/hd225.htm

Thanks to Hal and to Rodger Turner and all the other people at sfsite!

My review of Richard Morgans Woken Furies is now online at infinityplus.co.uk:

http://www.infinityp...wokenfuries.htm

Thanks again to Keith Brooke!

Gestern abend habe ich also - wie es sich gehört total übernächtigt unter unter leichtem Alkoholeinfluss vom Vorabend - zwei meiner Texte vor Publikum präsentiert. Öffentlich! Der Besuch war reichlich, offenbar haben meine Bitten und Drohungen also sogar über den persönlichen Bekanntenkreis hinaus Wirkung gezeitigt.
Neben dezent eingestreuten Lobeshymnen auf Hal Duncan, Jeff VanderMeer und Pat Cadigan (denen ich in diesem Zusammenhang allen für irgendwas zu danken habe, und deren Bücher viel mehr gekauft und gelesen und überhaupt werden sollten ...) habe ich zwei Texte von mir präsentiert: "Heimdiagonose" aus der Phase 2 (als Druckversion unter:
http://phase2.nadir....l=365&print=ja)

... und einen Teil von "Das Vermächtnis des Großen Essers" (hier: http://www.epilog.de...C068/index.html
Und so ruhig und still und aufmerksam war das Publikum sogar, dass ich weit über den von mir vorbereiteten Teil hinauslesen konnte! (was allerdings wohl eher meiner völligen Zeitfehleinschätzung beim Vorbereiten geschuldet war ...)

Jedenfalls vielen Dank an alle die da waren, An die OrganisatorInnen der Linken Buchtage, die Leute vom Schwarze-Risse-Laden und an Dirk für die zusätzliche Werbung! Fest steht schon mal, dass ich das wiederholen werde, sobald sich wieder ein geeigneter Rahmen bietet.

Watched Silent Hill two nights ago ... I hope I'll finally be able to sleep again tonight.
This movie may be far from being the blending of Twin Peaks and Hellraiser it aspires to be, but it's still bloody effective, and it makes little compromise. Yes, there's a lot a crappy dialogue. Yes, there's little in the way of characterization. In fact, the main character of the computer game Silent Hill 2 was much more fleshed out then Rose, the Hero of the movie. Yes, Alice Krige basically plays the Borg Queen once again. And yes, towards the end, the movie just stops to give us about five minutes of background information on the plot, all narrated by one of the characters.
And still this movie is sublime in it's way. It's sublimity lies in the sickness of it's creatures and places, in the rotten, organic quality of the spirit-world it creates. In this respect, it's absolutely true to the game: Theres a place in the unconscious of the modern subject where raw matter and abstract ideas of the human condition meet. It's the place of absolute bodily desire and absolute horror, and Silent Hill truly embodies this unbearable ambivalence of flesh and spirit. In a way, it's more Lovecraftian than Lovecraft - at least if we look at it as linked to the magical, symbolic strand in Lovecrafts fiction.

Some if the things that struck me about the movie (positively and negatively):

The backstory was quite intelligent - but, as I said before, it wasn't distributed to well. To many information-dumps. But it was nevertheless something you could think about. It also created a nice anbivalence regarding the question if Rose did the "right thing" - or if there was a "right thing" to do.

Rose is a a pretty one-dimensional hero - She has no dark secret, and her motivation remains the same throughout the whole movie: to save Sharon. That's kind of a pity, expecially if you think of Silent Hill 2 where the creatures and places of the town represent the guilt-ridden unconscious of the main character. While the protagonist of Silent Hill 2 walked through his own nightmare, Rose basically walks through the nightmare of her adopted daugter. This could probably have been fixed by combining the characters of Rose and Dahlia.

There are some great stylistic elements, many of them lifted directly from the games - tilted camera angles, drawn-out fade-to-blacks. In the intensely nightmarish sequence about halfway through the film, there's also this deeply unsettling effect of "can't break free": When the "Janitor" (the extremely creepy creature on the school toilet) slowly and spastically approaches Rose, she's paralysed by shock. We don't really see how she gathers herself, breaks out of her paralysis (which would be a moment of relief). Instead, the movie goes from her being paralysed directly to her on the run again - a nice nightmarish touch: even though Rose must have managed somehow to gather herself, the moment disappears in the overall horror. There's only shock, terror, awe and running away. The same principle is repeated shortly thereafter at the approach of Pyramid-Head.

I loved the Janitor. I could swear he was in my room the last two nights. I was wonderfully afraid. It made me feel sublimely sick.

What didn't work was the final confrontation btw. Rose and Christabella. Just to cheesy, and to drawn out. The whole "burn her!" - "you must understand your own guilt" - "burn her! burn her!" thing was repetitive and should have been handled a lot more subtle.
On the other hand, the distanced look on Rose's face in the showdown was just perfect. She really looked like having crossed over to the other side of terror - now being part of the forces of horror herself.

The absence of male characters in the A-plot could have made for some interesting dynamics - with five central female characters, there was much potential for deviation from stereotypical female roles. But since the movie was so definitely about mothership, all of the female characters kind of got sucked into this paradigm - all different kind of mothers, but certainly all of them defined as or in relation to mothers. It's an interesting topic, but it would have been nice to add a female character who's not defined by her relation to "mothering" to the mix.

I felt a little let down that there was practically no original soundtrack music - most of it had been lifted directly from the games. Since I already own the soundtracks of all four games, I would have loved to get some new Silent-Hill-Music along with the movie.

I'm really quite happy with this movie. Not overwhelmed, but certainly not underwhelmed. It got the visuals right, and that's probably the most important thing to be said about it.

Proofreading the Had Duncan Interview (which will soon be online at sfsite.com), I got thinking about some of the things Hal said about H.P. Lovecraft, more specifically: That the 'Elder Gods' in Lovecrafts mythology are basically extra-dimensional entities and therefore not metaphysical in the classical sense.

Im not exactly a Lovecraftian - I've read and enjoyed most of his stories, but the only reason to re-read them would be some kind of 'scientific' interest. Nevertheless, I have enough grasp of his stuff to comment on Hals position: I don't think I agree completely. To be sure, the 'Great Old Ones' are basically aliens, and even the 'Elder Gods' and the 'Outer Gods', slightly different classes of beings who are respectively more human-like and even less human-like than the Great Old Ones, are more rooted in some weird scientific ideas than in religious and magical traditions: For example, Azatoth, the most powerful of the 'Outer Gods', is described as 'mindless nuclear chaos' - he's basically a living sun, the impersonal principle of the Universe itself.
On the other these beings are called 'gods', some of them are worshipped by cults, and Lovecraft seems to love to use the term 'blasphemous' to describe their very nature. There's clearly a strong link between science and religion - think how 'Mountains of Madness' replaces a religious origin story of humankind with a scientific one (to the horror of it's discoverers), think how 'God', Azatoth, is described in terms more related to the Atom bomb (Clearly, we can see Lovecraft as a dark scientific visionary today). And think also that there are Mythos-figures who are more anthropomorphic and clearly rooted in monotheist religions - for example Nyarlathotep, the messenger of the Outer Gods and the tempter of mankind. In Lovecrafts cold, scientific, soulless universe, theres still a lot of 'religion' going on. That makes Lovecrafts mythology, above all else, quite self-contradictory.

Now that's a great thing. Being self-conttadictory means developing a consciousness of the fact that we live in a self-contradictory world.

Which brings me to Horkheimer and Adorno - Two German philosophers and sociologist, who, in 1944, wrote The Dialectics of Enlightenment (I hope that is how the title has been translated into English ...), a book deeply marked by the experience of national-socialism. Horkheimer and Adorno, both of Jewish descent, both Marxists, lived in exile in the US at that time. Dialectics of Enlightenment was their attempt to somehow get to terms with the fact that bourgeois civilization had not, as some other Marxists had predicted, evolved into communism. Instead, the German proletariat, which was supposed to be part of the emancipatory force of history, had turned to the barbarism of fashism. This historical catastrophe led Horkheimer and Adorno to the idea that the philosophy of Enlightenment, as much as it had been a prerequisite for humankinds emancipation, had always also had a tendency to fall back into 'myth' (no, that's not the Cthulhu-Mythos yet ...).

Of course, there's no chance that I'll be able to explain what I understand of this approach, entitled 'Critical Theory', here. Let's oversimplify: Back then, in the times of Gods and Monsters, humankind feared nature as an uncontrollable force of fate. To get to terms with this fear, it gave human names, faces and souls to nature: we get animism and polytheism. The gods are still capricious, but there's a chance to make some kind of deal with them, using magic and rituals.

But magic of rituals were also always instruments of power that allowed humans to rule over other humans. Now, the people being ruled over don't always take such stuff. So, very early in history, there starts a process that somehow leads to the philosophy of Enlightenment: People start saying 'Hey - there are no gods and spirits. The stuff happening in nature follows some kind of causality, and we can figure that out and learn to control it. We don't need you scheming priest-bastards for that. we certainly don't need you to spill our blood and the altar of your gods.' So, instead of multiple spirits and gods, we get the one principle of reason - which kind of works acceptably with monotheism. Still, there's a process of emancipation going on in this.

With the arrival of capitalism, rational thinking becomes more and more the fashion of the era. In capitalism, the human subject has to consider itself to a certain extent rational and free in it's choices - that's a prerequisite of this subject being able to enter into a contract, which is a central function of capitalism.
And there the real problem begins: Capitalism establishes a structure that seems to the individual living under it's rule as some kind of 'Second Nature': The rules of society ('If you want to eat, you have to work', for example) appear as rules of nature. The thing is that each individual in capitalist society experiences these rules of society as some kind of nature, and that this prevents the individual from truly realizing that this structure is made and reproduced by humans - not only by some evil, scheming capitalists, but by society as a whole. So the subject, that appears to be free, in fact isn't free. But hey, at least Enlightenment and Capitalism gave us a pretty wortwhile idea of freedom!

But the ongoing quest of controlling nature, eliminating everything unknown, has in fact a tendency to empty out the human subject itself: The idea of nature becomes blind and soulless, and so becomes the idea of humanity. In national socialism, this process resulted in the 'Verdinglichung' (no idea how to translate this ...), in the ideological organzisation of the self-contradictory aspects of society into two main principles that were identified with different kinds of 'nature': The 'Arian race' and the 'Semitic race'. National-socialst society saw itself as identical with the process of their nature, carrying out their 'natural mission' of exterminating - murdering - all Jews. The subject, that was still the central character in classical bourgeois society, didn't play much of a role in this any more - the 'Volksgemeinschaft' was everything. Even though I certainly don't want to ´compare contemporary theoretical neurologists to the Nazis, you can't help but notice that some of their thesises on freedom of choice also tend to 'cancel out' the subject - if it's really all just firing neurons, we do nothing more than to blindly carry out 'natures mission'. And that's, basically, Horkheimer's and Adorno's thesis of Enlightenment falling back into myth: Humankind, who tried to emancipate itself from the forces of nature by Enlightenment, in the end has only managed to fall under it's spell in an even more profound way. I would argue that, probably on a very abstract level, Horkheimer and Adorno have made a very valid point.

Now back to Lovecraft. Remember him being self-contradictory? Yep - exactly. His 'Elder Gods' are emblemetic of the dialectic relation mentioned above - they are gods and blind processes, describable only in the terminology of reason AND religion at once. They are myth and Reason at once. Lovecrafts work truly embodies humankind's fear of falling back into the process of nature, under it's cold, meaningless spell. Think 'The Shadow over Innsmouth': Here the protagonist, led to the coast town of Innsmouth by biological imperative, mutates into a sea-dweller - in evelotionary terms surely a step backward. But this transformation is at the same time described as some kind of 'Enlightenment' about the true, unspeakable nature (!) of the world. Progress is regress. The fear of 'degeneration' was a prominent theme of the times - there's Well's Island of Dr. Moreau, Conrad's Heart of Darkness. You'll even find it in Kiplings (so deeply, deeply reactionary ...) Jungle Book. This fear was nearly always articulated in racist terms, it was 'verdinglicht', turned into some kind of 'nature' itself - the problem was projected onto a group that was defined by some crude biological or anthropological theory, and the fantasy was that by eliminating this group, humankind could somehow get 'whole' again, lose it's fear of nature. In Lovecraft, it's a little different: He has a tendency to revel in degeneration, to invest it with sublime qualities, and this, while still being deeply linked to racist terms, comes much closer to provoking some critical thinking on the dialectics of Enlightenment.

There's also something very speaking in Lovecrafts 'talkiness' in describing his creatures, a talkiness that always kind of misses the point. The fact that scientific AND religious terminology both don't succeed to truly grasp their object, and the fact that the narrators keep on trying until their last breath, is extremely significant, for it shows that it's impossible to integrate these beings into a 'logical' system, not even in the empty form of the 'variable' which they take on in so many classic Gothics. There's another contradiction at work here, one that I haven't quite figured out yet. Since I'll be reading some stuff by French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva in the next few weeks, I hope I'll be able to get back to this from another perspective. Mark my words: Lovecrafts creatures are semiotic. It's just that I'm not yet sure what exactly that means ...

My review of Justina Robsons novel Natural History is now online at infinityplus.co.uk. Many thanks to Keith Brooke for running this great website!

direct link:
http://www.infinityp...uralhistory.htm

In gut einer Woche ist es soweit: Am Samstag, dem 20. Mai lese ich im Rahmen der linken Buchtag im Schwarze-Risse-Buchladen, Mehringhof/Gneisenaustraße 2a in Berlin - 20 Uhr, also zur Prime-time! Auf dem Programm steht nicht nur ein Auszug aus meiner Alien-Contact-Story "Das Vermächtnis des Großen Essers", sondern auch knappes und sonderbares aus den Randbereichen der SF. Ich wünsche mir natürlich ein volles Haus und freue mich ebensosehr über Bekannte wie über unbekannte Gesichter!

Die "offizielle" Ankündigung lautet jetzt:

Fremdkörperkontakte - Jakob Schmidt liest SF und Fast-SF
Was passiert, wenn die Verdinglichung von "Sicherheit, Sauberkeit und Service" technologischer Ernst wird? Wie gelangt man nach Ubahf Zoolg? Wer ist Juri Dadarin und an welcher unerkannten tödlichen Krankheit leidet er?
Und die wichtigste Frage: Wer kommt eigentlich zur Lesung?
Am Samstag, dem 20. Mai um 20 Uhr im Buchladen Schwarze Risse, Gneisenaustr. 2a (Mehringhof), Berlin. Im Rahmen der linken Buchtage.

Das übrige Programm findet sich übrigens unter www.linkebuchtage.de

So, jetzt schalte ich gleich mal mein Diktiergerät an, lese meinen Text zur Probe, höre mir das an und überlege mir ob ich dann am Samstag nächste Woche vielleicht doch ganz plötzlich krank bin ;-)

From scifi-com:



This is great news - I haven't read Air yet, but what I have read by Ryman I loved. One more reason to definitely check this one out as soon as the paperback edition arrives!