Morvern Callar, art cinema and the monstrous archive

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Morvern Callar, art cinema and the monstrous
archive

• John Caughie

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Alasdair Gray, Unlikely Stories Mostly (1983)

• Work as is you were living in the early days of
  a better nation.

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Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II The Time-Image (1985)

• Art, and especially cinematographic art, must
  take part in this task not that of addressing a
  people, which is presupposed already there, but
  of contributing to the invention of a people.
• Not the myth of a past people, but the
  story-telling of the people to come.

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Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II The Time-Image (1985)

• Black American cinema makes a return to the
  ghettos, returns to this side of a consciousness,
  and, instead of replacing a negative image of the
  black with a positive one, multiplies types and
  characters, and each time creates or re-creates
  only a small part of the image which no longer
  corresponds to a linkage of actions, but to
  shattered states of emotions or drives,
  expressible in pure images and sounds the
  specificity of black cinema is now defined by a
  new form, the struggle that must bear on the
  medium itself.

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David Martin-Jones, Orphans, a work of minor
cinema from post-devolutionary Scotland, in
Journal of British Cinema and Television, (2004)

• Deleuzes theory illustrates how Mullans film
  performs a minor action on an aesthetic which has
  previously been used to create an Anglo-centric,
  consensual view of British national identity, and
  how, in doing so, it aids the recreation of
  Scottish national identity after devolution. Thus
  Orphans textual renegotiation of social realism
  parallels the nations, and the film industrys,
  attempts to recreate a sense of Scottish national
  identity in relation to the vestiges of
  Britain.

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Paul Willemen, The National revisited, in
Theorising National Cinema (2006)

• there is a diametrical opposition between
  identity and subjectivity. The former, being what
  the institutionally orchestrated practices of
  address seek to impose, constitutes a
  never-quite-fitting straitjacket the latter is
  an ambiguous term designating individuals as the
  crossroads or condensation points of multiple
  sets of institutionally organised discursive
  practices. Subjectivity always exceeds
  identity, since identity formation consists of
  trying to pin us to a specific, selected
  sub-set of the many diverse clusters of discourse
  we traverse in our lifetimes, and that stick to
  us to varying degrees. Some aspects of our
  subjectivity may be occupied or hijacked by the
  national identity modes of address, but there are
  always dimensions within our sense of subjective
  individuality that escape and exceed any such
  identity straitjacket.

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Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, (1999)

• When a culture loses its means of transmission,
  man is deprived of reference points and finds
  himself wedged between, on the one hand, a past
  that incessantly accumulates behind him and
  oppresses him with the multiplicity of its
  now-indecipherable contents, and on the other
  hand a future that he does not yet possess and
  that does not throw any light on his struggle
  with the past.
• the infinite accumulation of the old in a sort
  of monstrous archive

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Glasgow Film Office

• Creating businesses of scale is essential for the
  sustainable growth and development of the sector.
  GFO will work with local production companies and
  facilities service companies to help develop
  more businesses of scale within the city, working
  with businesses that have demonstrated high
  growth potential whatever their size.

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Alan Warner, Morvern Callar (1995)

• I placed both hands on my tummy at the life
  there, the life growing right in there. The child
  of the raves. I put my head down and closed
  my mouth. I started the walking forward into that
  night.

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Alan Warner, Morvern Callar (1995)

• I started the walking forward into that night.

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Susan Sontag, Against interpretation (1964)

• Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By
  reducing the work of art to its content and then
  interpreting that, one tames the work of art.
  Interpretation makes art manageable,
  conformable.
• In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics
  of art.

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Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, (1999

• Wherever the critic encounters art, he brings
  it back to its opposite, dissolving it in
  non-art wherever he exercises his reflection, he
  brings with him non-being and shadow, as though
  he had no other means to worship art than the
  celebration of a kind of black mass in honor of
  the deus inversus, the inverted god, of non-art.

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Scottish Malt Whisky Society

• Whisky barrels, being made from natural material,
  cannot be perfectly sealed. Indeed the ability of
  the barrels to breathe is vital to the final
  taste of the product. When a barrel is filled,
  there is an initial in-drink of about 2 and
  then during the years that a barrel spends in the
  bonded warehouse about two percent of the
  contents are lost to evaporation each year. When
  barrels are opened after say four years maturing,
  around 10 of the contents will have disappeared.
• This loss is known in the trade as the angel's
  share