The Filth and the Fury

It may not have escaped your notice that last week saw the publication of a 50th Anniversary edition of D.H.Lawrence's celebrated novel. This edition looks interesting on a number of fronts, not only does it include the unexpurgated text, but also essays by Geoffrey Roberston and Steve Hare, but also a timeline  of events around the trial and is supported by a useful website. For a useful piece on the effect the book has had on our cultural and legal landscape see Geoffrey Robertson's piece in the Guardian, The Filthy Fifth Columnist. We are looking at a number of events and initiatives in the Law School at Westminster  to celebrate this, watch this space...

Creep

From my favourite magazine, the word, a great reinterpretation of Radiohead's Creep. While we are about it this is also a recent favourite, although the song is certainly not my usual cup of tea.

Bronco Bullfrog

Yesterday we screened Bronco Bullfrog, Barney Platts-Mills' classic 1970 film set in the East end of London, that has been described as a lost mod classic and has acquired cult status. The context for this screening was that it marked the 40th anniversary of its first screening at what is now known as the Old Cinema at  the University of Westminster  in October 1970. As has previously been written on the blog, for example around the passing of Tony Tenser, the University of Westminster has a long and celebrated history as regards film, and the University is currently trying to raise funds to restore 'The birthplace of British Cinema'. Bronco was re released as a digital print some months ago and I and an esteemed colleague, Alex  Sinclair, himself no stranger to the 1970s, were able to show not only Barney Platts-Mills, but also Sam Shepherd (aka Bronco himself!) and Roy Haywood (Roy), around the Old Cinema, bringing back a lot of memories for them all. The trailer of the film can be found here and the DVD, blu-ray and (excellent) soundtrack provided by The Audience,  can of course be found at all good stockists.

Law, Sport and Education

A special issue of the Entertainment and Sports Law Journal has been published, entitled  Law Sport and Education, and available via this link. This includes work from members of the Centre and, in addition, articles written by two former students of the LLM Entertainment Law programme at Westminster. You can subscribe to the ESLJ mailing list too from the journal homepage.

Surfing the Street: Photographing the Street in the Age of Panic

In an article on Eurozine, Karl Palmas fascinatingly reflected on Gilles Deleuze’s attraction for surf, as expressed by the French philosopher in a 1985 interviews: as opposed to ‘old sports’ in which

we are the source of the movement. Running, putting the shot, and so on: effort, resistance, with a starting point, a lever ... All the new sports – surfing, windsurfing, hang-gliding – take the form of entering into an existing wave. There's no longer an origin as starting point, but a sort of putting-into-orbit. The key thing is how to get taken up in the motion of a big wave, a column of rising air, to 'get into something' instead of being the origin of an effort.

In Palmas words,

Deleuze goes on to contrast these new habits of sport with the old habits of thought still prevalent in contemporary philosophy. Rather than creating concepts in relation to movement and becoming, philosophy still reflects upon that which is supposedly eternal and fixed.

This radical becoming, something we could roughly refer as the flow of existence, is akin to Henri Bergson’s notion of duration:

In Bergson's thought, "the immobile" denotes matter; the actual world of things perceived and understood by humans. "The mobile", on the other hand, denotes duration; the "virtual" processes that Bergson calls "the true evolution, the radical becoming" that escapes us

This ever-escaping virtual can only be approached through intuition as the method by which we make use of our own duration to affirm and immediately to recognise the existence of other durations, above or below us. That is, through which we ‘surf’ through reality, keeping the pace of the radical becoming of life.

Another French philosopher, Henri Lefebvre, in the last years of his life embarked upon a project he termed rhythmanalysis, that is, the study of the rhythms and flows of urban life, melodies of routines and ruptures forming the pattern of urban existence. Commuters walking to the train station, passers-by walking absent-mindedly, children running around a fountain, people chatting on a bench, runners, beggars, but also the legal regulations, the unwritten rules, opening and closing times of shops. Lefebvre would look at these flows from a detached position, like a window, seeking to extrapolate from the differences and repetition of these multiple practices the hidden patterns produced by – as well as regulating – them.

Lefebvre’s window, however, is a bit too detached, somewhat Cartesian, something like looking at people surfing from the beach, studying their movements without actually understanding them. Surely interesting, compelling, even funny, Lefebvre’s window is still too comfortable and too static: surfing with thought requires a bigger effort, one that Deleuze

likens ... to an apprenticeship, and to the process of learning to swim – being forced to coordinate one's body with other modi

This is what street photographers are, surfers in the melodic fabric of urban life, uncompromisingly mingled with the urban flows, always looking for ruptures, patterns, tipping points, routines, that everyday virtuality which always escapes, always overlooked by the passive gaze with which we walk, daily, through our lives. Street photography is just that, artistic immersion into the smooth space of the city: nothing mysterious, esoteric or mystic, just an art of ‘going with the flow’, encapsulated not in Henri-Cartier Bresson’s quest for the ‘decisive moment’, but rather in Garry Winogrand’s “continuously chasing after the eternal nowness of life itself in all its raw, unmediated energy”, as Sean O’Hagan puts it in recent article on the Observer.

Street photography is both a ‘genre’ in itself and, in some sense, transversal to the whole history of photography. Taking inspiration from Friedlander’s, Winogrand’s and Meyerowitz’s 60s age d’or of street photography, Sean O’Hagan reflects on the state of the art of street photography today: whilst the genre is undergoing a vibrant, artistic renaissance, is also facing ever-increasing restrictions, stemming from different set of anxieties, claims, panics. Intersecting concerns such as terrorism, surveillance, paedophilia, intrusion and privacy mean that the unrestrained freedom enjoyed by street photography 40 years ago is today unthinkable, as the photographer must continuously negotiate his/her way through draconian laws, suspicious policemen and concerned citizens. These contradictory trajectories are intersected by yet another one, the democratisation or perhaps, less optimistically, bastardisation of street photography into a widespread DIY practice, allowed by the availability of cheap video-devices, most notably mobile phones.

It seems that the less tolerated photography is, when practiced by individual, the more is accepted, and practiced, by institutions. As this modern version of Baudelaire’s flaneur (equipped with camera instead of notebook, that is) is increasingly marginalised and criminalised, the same practice is taken on more and more ubiquitously by public and private institutions, with UK’s all-encompassing street surveillance and Google Street View as just two most stunning examples of this dubious double standard. Perhaps this is the kind of control that Gilles Deleuze reflects upon in his brief but hugely influential Postscript on the Societies of Control, i.e. the shift from discipline to control, from a static, panoptical form of surveillance to dynamic, insidious modulation of the apparatus of control in continuous adaption onto the different flows and rhythms of urban life. From panopticon to street photography: surfing the street, going with the flow – except that it is now institutions of control, not individuals, who are surfing, with the Law providing them with the exclusive right to do so.

Contemporaneously hijacked by public and private institutions and criminalised, as well as caricatured in the Facebook-fuelled frenzy to record & share every bit of existence: is there still room for street photography? The answer is yes, now more than ever, in the urban experience subjected to image overload, we need the moving eye of the street photographer, the urban surfer able to effortlessly immerge himself in the patterns of urban life, making sense of the multiple contradiction of the genre, bordering between skills and luck, intrusion and observation, voyeurism and exploration, art galleries and oblivion, both natural and difficult at the same time, just like surfing, or skating – incidentally the former profession of one of the promising photographer of the new generation, Matt Stuart.

It is in this capacity for glimpsing the radical becoming of everyday experience that lies the potentiality of street photography to subvert the taken-for-grantedness of the everyday, not simply observing but, as Stephen Gill,

reacting to a place that I had stumbled on, and the place completely moulded and shaped the work. I was reacting, really, rather than going out looking.

This potential is not only artistic but also political, and not simply in the commonsensical sense of photography as a means to keep authorities on check – street photography is also more than this, as testified for instance by the work of Stephen Gill’s himself, able to challenge the LO 2012’s vision of East End as ‘wasteland’ to be regenerated – by showing the inner, oft-overlooked uniqueness of Hackney Wick’s fields, markets, canals and marshes. This is the potential which is threatened by institutional power and moral panic and even, more disturbingly, taken over by those very institutions. It is against such a threat that street photography has to be celebrated –not simply as a basic freedom to take picture, but also as a form of art able to rescue us from the (political?) numbness of city-life.

Some of Gary Winogrand's pictures are currently exhibited at the Tampa Museum of Art, FL

Of centres and peripheries

 This week I was invited along to the launch of a new British Library initiative, Sport and Society. The Summer Olympics through the lens of social science. This is a really exciting development, as the site notes, it 'presents the Olympics as a global sporting event that tells us something about the way individuals, groups and institutions operate in society, and the ideas that drive them' and aims to highlight the British Library social science collection. At the  launch there were a number of very interesting presentations, including Andy Miah talking about some of the problems of saving and archiving alternative media representations of the Olympics, and tapping into some of the research he has conducted with Dr Beatriz Garcia, fore more details see his excellent website. All this talk of marginal voices reminded me of a recent conference in Malmo I attended, also tied into issues of margins and marginality, entitled Centres and Peripheries in Sport. This was an excellent conference arguing that areas at the periphery of sport ought to be reconfigured and reconstituted to reflect the importance of areas that have for too long been seen as marginal. Material from the conference will soon be posted on the website above and all the resources noted above have useful material about sport, society and the Olympics that are well worth consulting.

Human Rights in Film

At the University of Westminster the excellent Dr Emma McClean organises an ongoing series of films under the banner of a Human Rights Film Series. Recent films shown include No Man's Land and Persepolis and these are always a welcome addition to the life of the Law School, and much appreciated by the students. I have just noticed that Human Rights Watch are organising a film festival that looks well worth looking into. It begins in London on 17th March and carries on until the 26th March - there are lots of interesting films being shown within three themes; 'Accountability and Justice', 'Development and Migration' and 'Closed Societies: Iran and North Korea'.  In the 'Accountability and Justice' theme In the Land of the Free... and War Don Don look especially of interest look well worth checking out, but the festival as a whole looks very worthwhile.