Jesse Jones

Against the Realm of the Absolute | Jesse Jones | June 2011 |

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Against the Realm of the Absolute |

The Megaphone Choir

male domination, to condemn other things that are essentially male dominated, completely inverting the dualistic relationship of men and women.

Jasmine Bray Triance describes her experience as a workshop contributor and member of the Megaphone Choir.

But what if this relationship was not just inverted but halved? What if men ceased to exist? And with them, conflict?

A production almost entirely shaped by women. Is this radical?

I expected the negative tone of the voice within me to have disappeared but yet it spoke out like a disapproving parent reminding me of the unthinkable things I was about to get myself into.

Models of hierarchy and conservativeness continue to make women question the nature of feminism.

To distinguish your feminism is hard to determine without the influence of other women and without looking to how feminism has been represented historically.

Workshops, set up prior to rehearsals for the film, elicited dialogue about films directed by women. Of all the films, Lizzie Borden’s 1983 Born In Flames impressed me the most. The science fiction documentary set in New York follows the development of a women’s army and their attempt to overthrow a male dominant society responsible for sexism, racism and unemployment. Everyone at the screening thought that the film was a dated and comic vision of the future.

Jesse Jones mentioned that Borden’s intentions for the film were incredibly serious. If the characters were not women but stereotypical terrorists, the film would instantly become a more serious prediction of modern day events. I would suggest that the film represents the potential women have to be clandestine, much in the way any extremist would be, if not more so, by hiding behind the labels that suppress women. The end of the film is fast-paced and the women seem to take control too easily.

In all the films screened, women were the subjects of oppositeness.

Good. Evil. Women. Men. Rich.

Poor. Chaos. Order. These opposing terms are instinctively ordered into a hierarchy. Perhaps then it is the tendency of women, in the rejection of

Jesse Jones’s film explores one resulting possibility. Against the Realm of the Absolute explores a distant future populated by women, far beyond capitalism and the existence of men (having died of a sex-specific disease). The downfall of capitalism is still celebrated in a ritual performed by women in a grey dystopia.

Intertwined with the ritual are multiple narratives of feminism and protest, referencing other science fiction works as well as real protests of the recent past. One example is the appropriated text of J K Gibson-Grahams’ The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It). Alongside seven other women, I performed this text in a Megaphone Choir. Like any choir, we were unified not just in voice, but in the embodiment of the text, bringing power and life to it. The megaphone is a gesture of protest today, but in this future it is used as a formal tool to evoke remembrance. It isn’t used to direct a message towards anyone, which I imagine, might make the performance look hollow to the viewer.

As well as a Megaphone Choir with no audience, the use of mirrors in the film to fracture the image of the women and reflect the dystopic environment, could be viewed as a symbolic shift in dualistic relationships.

In this future there is no culture and no other. The relationships that have defined humanity throughout time and the dualistic philosophy we use to interpret the world has gone astray - and with it passion?

Perhaps the purpose of the film is to take a radical view to demonstrate a caution - as is customary in previous narratives of dystopia - against such possibilities growing from within today’s social and economic systems.

The Day After The World Never Ended

July 2011. Today will bring the most labour intensive part of it to a close via a very special day trip, to film the final and most crucial three scenes for the ten-minute post-apocalyptic feminist science-fiction film.

aka Jesse Jones Meets The Creatures From The Ash Lagoon.

Neil Cooper's diary of the film shoot.

Inspired by The Female Man, a novel by separatist feminist science-fiction writer Joanna Russ, written in 1970 and first published in 1975, Against the Realm of the Absolute sets itself in what Jones calls 'the superfuture' of 2031 when men have been wiped out and capitalism has ended. By setting up a series of 'future historical re-enactments', Jones attempts to merge feminist theory with sci-fi, a genre normally the preserve of geeky boys and sexless sociopathic men.

Russ, however, was an iconoclastic and radical figure, whose death in April 2011 suggests that Jones might just have picked up the torch for a new generation.

It is the morning after the day the world never ended, and everything feels fine. With the much vaunted Rapture of 18.00 hours Greenwich Meantime on Saturday May 21st 2011 having passed without incident and apparently revised for October 21st later this year, it's a windy and rainy Sunday morning in Edinburgh.

Collective, too, is a hive of activity equally of its own making. Two sets of placards lean against the wall while a woman in tracksuit bottoms and an orange hoodie polishes down several large silver coloured triangles so swishly that you can see your face in them. Which, as it turns out, is the point.

Slowly but steadily a stream of women arrive at the gallery, all dressed down in utilitarian shades of grey.

As the women collect up placards, painted grey and emblazoned with an image of a nail-varnished female hand wrapped round a penis, one can't help but think of the all-female protests at Greenham Common and Faslane nuclear bases in the 1980s.

As it is, while the urgency of a real life protest-in-waiting charges the air, the day out that is to follow offers a very different proposition.

Jesse Jones is the Dublin-based artist and film-maker who for the last ten months has been researching Against the Realm of the Absolute, a new film-based project for the Collective, set to be screened June and

Against the Realm of the Absolute draws inspiration too from a series of weekly screenings at Edinburgh’s Filmguild Cinema of seminal but little-known feature films made by women. With post-screening discussions led by Jones, the series kicked off with another rad-fem scifi flick, Born In Flames, made by Lizzie Borden in 1983. This was followed by Maeve, Pat Murphy and John Davies' 1981 view of the Irish Troubles from a female perspective, and other works by Yvonne Rainer, Chantal Akerman, Jane Arden and Maya Deren. The cast of Jones' film is drawn from those who attended these screenings. Jones also references Brecht, Meyerhold and Busby Berkeley, as well as Jerzy Skolimowski's 1978 film, The Shout. Adapted from a Robert Graves short story, The Shout tells of a strange drifter played by Alan Bates, who claims to have been taught an unholy guttural

Is this a responsibility we must adhere to within the contemporary arts? | | | | |

Against the Realm of the Absolute | Workshops | April 2011

Jesse Jones

| Against the Realm of the Absolute | Production shot | May 2011

Against the Realm of the Absolute |

Jesse Jones

cry by an Aboriginal shaman possessed with the power to kill. To the experimental composer played by John Hurt, this proves a fascinating proposition.

By a strange quirk of serendipity that also marks the demise of Joanna Russ, The Shout, alongside Skolimowski's earlier film, Deep End, will show during the run of Against the Realm of the Absolute on June 26th at Edinburgh International Film Festival 2011 as part of a mini retrospective of Skolimowski works.

Against the Realm of the Absolute will be screened alongside a performance by the Megaphone Choir at Teviot Row House as part of Edinburgh International Film Festival the day before. Coincidence? Or is something bigger happening here?

For Jones' purposes the ash-logged scenes found on the Scottish east coast must become a bleak and barren desert of future-shocked dystopia, where political and artistic theory can be transformed into equally provocative action.

The three final set-ups being filmed today, Jones says, are one with all the women holding aloft the placards with the penis and the hand, a stylised group shot of the women throwing stones in formation à la Meyerhold, and, finally, the longawaited Megaphone Choir, in which the women will be filmed from above while striking a Busby Berkeley-style collective pose and declaiming in unison the text that appears on the other placards on board.

This text, referring to a 'straw man' is taken from The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), the 1996 tome published under the name of J K Gibson-Graham, the collectively (that word again) constructed pen name of feminist economic geographers Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson. The use of the megaphones for such a united action relates to The Shout, Jones says, and is a form of re-enactment as an absurdist gesture.

With such an emphasis on the social, the collective and the participatory, Jones' work is a form of protest by stealth. Or, as Jones herself puts it, protest as a way of reigniting a belief system.

The wind is up beneath the pylons on location, so everyone huddles into the mini-buses to watch the rushes of yesterday's filming on Kate's laptop, while devouring an indoor picnic of sandwiches and doughnuts.

Everything Jones has said so far is made clear whilst watching the

rushes, including the use of grey costumes on the grey landscape. The footage is silent, and the ratio of the screen isn't right, so the Mirroresses are distorted even more as their bodies bleed into abstract shapes on the big silver triangles - especially as they shimmer ever so slightly in the wind.

‘Does it look like how it felt?’,asks Kate.

‘Noooo!’, comes the collective reply.

By the time lunch has finished and everybody has signed in, Ash has arrived with Jill. Ash realises she's wearing different glasses than she was the day before, and there are worries over continuity. At the end of the day, though, one more Brechtian device can't do any harm.

Still in the car park, Fiona leads everyone through a physical and vocal warm-up before the Megaphone Choir line-up in a row with their megaphones to run through the day's far-off final sequence. After a few false starts, the rehearsal becomes increasingly and impressively tight as the Choir tap into each other’s rhythm. After a quick head-count, everyone piles into the mini-bus and heads for the first location, which is the one with dunes of ash, like a 1974 Doctor Who set. The central bank of ash at the centre of one of the ridges isn't as dark as the others either side of it.

The wind is pretty unrelenting and surgical style masks and goggles are handed out lest ash blows into eyes, noses and throats. If you wear a hat and a hood while sporting such accoutrements, your reflection in the mini-bus mirror vaguely resembles some early 1990s novelty rave act.

Nevertheless, Tessa, Tess, Jas, Gio, Fiona, Ash and Geraldine keep their masks and goggles on as they rehearse the stone-throwing in what is essentially a piece of slow-motion classicist choreography overseen by Jones, who gives the group vocal signals for each move as a quarterback would on an American football team.

Jones directs from the bottom of the ridge using one of the megaphones to speak over the wind, tweaking each performer into positions that give the whole image dimension and depth. The wind is blowing in earnest now, and during one of the rehearsals Tess is nearly blown from the top of the ridge as a gust catches her raised placard and almost brings her back down to earth. Everyone works out a way of spinning the placards around that will avoid this. Once Tess is moved to what is the front of a carefully aligned three rows,

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however, it doesn't stop ash blowing into her eyes, causing another hold-up.

Up until now the group have been going through their motions with coats, masks and goggles on. In a moment, though, the light will be just so, and once they take off their layers so there's only grey on grey, everything changes. With the cameras rolling, each performer turns their placard, with Gio and Tess at the front raising them high. Suddenly they look united, like some out of time arrangement of Ann Lee's Shakers or dressed-down suffragettes holding a silent vigil.

If One Plus One was Godard at his most didactic, by 1972's Tous va Bien, starring Yves Montand and Jane Fonda, he was questioning the very nature of love, revolution and film itself. It is from Tous va Bien that Jones chose the image of the penis cradled by a female hand that adorns the placards in Against the Realm of the Absolute.

There's something in Jones' work too of the guerilla tactics employed by Derek Jarman in his 1987 film The Last of England, a poetic meditation on life in Thatcher's Britain in which at one point a big-frocked and windswept Tilda Swinton cavorts on the beach in a manner not unlike some of Jones' actors. An associate producer and contributor to the soundtrack of Jarman's film, incidentally, was Mayo Thompson, who as leader of the band The Red Krayola has been a long-term collaborator with the Marxist-inspired conceptual art troupe Art & Language. It was The Red Krayola too who provided the title song for Born In Flames, as sung

by Lora Logic backed by Thompson and a band recruited from the late 1970s stable of Rough Trade Records, including bassist Gina Birch of all-female band The Raincoats.

Moving back to the previous location where some flat land sits beside the dunes, Jones directs the group rehearsing the stone sequence some more, running the group through their paces as a trainer would with a decathlon team. Jones runs them through the sequence of movements again and again until, even with their coats and masks back on, they're perfectly in synch, mirroring each other's actions yet retaining their individual physical tics at the same time.

Once the camera is rolling, with Jones kneeling on the ash, hood up, watching the action through a monitor, again, the show of strength on display both on camera and off is un-nerving.

With most of the group taking shelter

Against the Realm of the Absolute | Production shot | April 2011

in the mini-bus before moving on to the second location, DOP Kate and camera assistant Eanna film a closeup of Tessa, who sports what looks like a grey snood on her head, giving her the air of Tess of the d'Urbervilles (if Thomas Hardy's novel had been set down a coal mine). As it turns out, the snood turns out to be a skirt, and Tessa was actually named after Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

The convoy, now with the additions of the cherry-picker, makes its way to the second location. That's not before the security guard retriev-

Against the Realm of the Absolute | Production shot | April 2011

ing Jones' ash-covered pass tells her he's never seen such a dirty woman. In truth, though, she's not alone, as Tessa, Tess, Ash and Gio clean out the insides of their ears with toilet roll. In keeping with the science-fiction theme, the Megaphone Choir, it seems, really are the creatures from the ash lagoon.

Fiona leads the group through a warm-up that finds the Megaphone Choir humming in unison in a real life chorale that's only slightly hysterical from all the exposure to the elements over the preceding six hours.

It's decided that Tessa should now be

Against the Realm of the Absolute | Production shot | May 2011

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Against the Realm of the Absolute |

filmed performing the text solo, and, once she's swapped her screechy megaphone, delivers it with such vibrant intensity that it sounds like the call to arms it was undoubtedly intended to be.

Replicating Irrational Exuberance [1]

Now it's 9.12pm, the sun is almost down and everyone is jumping on the spot to stay warm. It's like a parade, laughs Jones, as she kneels astride the flat of the cherry-picker with the monitor in front of her.

Sure enough, with the Megaphone Choir surrounding the truck below her, Jones might well be the May Queen holding court over her subjects while aboard some festive float.

Who says revolution can't be fun?

It's 10pm now, and from a distance the Choir look like they're shimmying some spontaneous routine that might have been devised not so much by Busby Berkeley, as by Pan's People having just landed on the moon. Finally, Kate and Eanna are up on the deck of the elevated cherry-picker ready to roll, the light is casting gorgeous silhouettes onto camera and suddenly it's a take, the Megaphone Choir are off, sounding strident and unbreakable and invincible once more.

Jones is pushing it now with more cutaways and close-ups. Given the film's subject matter, there's a wonderfully unintentional irony in how she refers to her all-female cast as 'lads'. ‘Okay, lads, one more shot, just one more shot, lads, that's great, lads’, as Kate and Eanna pan slowly round the Choir in formation. Then, one final silhouette of Geraldine in the can for the lads, and, at 10.18pm, it's a wrap.

Isla Leaver-Yap responds to speculation within Science Fiction and how it relates to political narratives.

The light may be gone, but the struggle goes on. The world hasn't ended yet. | | | | |

Against the Realm of the Absolute | Workshops | March 2011

To follow Star Trek as symptomatic of American foreign policy is a fairly straightforward task. One need only glance at the franchise in terms of its television series: the original series from the 1960s is marked by a frontierism and is inflected with a unsubtle dose of Cold War politics, where captain and crew went out to find new worlds as one might real estate [2] ; The Next Generation’s emphasis on intergalactic diplomacy and unilateral peacekeeping was broadcast against the backdrop of warming relations between the United States and foreign allies; while the perpetually lost Voyager and the exploits of its captain Janeway ends, interestingly, at the beginning of George W Bush’s presidency [3]. With the exception of the frontierism of the original series (which made reference to the United Federation of Planets as if it were only speaking of the US), Star Trek is generally marked by a mood of post-capitalist federalism, which is to say a demonetised system of interplanetary alliances that loosely resembled the United Nations. And the distillation of this latter mood?

The replicator.

A machine able to create food, oxygen, tools and equipment, even spare human body parts, the replicator conveniently appears to eliminate the future problem of scarcity economics. The television series’ utopian vision of a moneyless society is supported solely by this machine, which produces ‘free goods’ and serves one’s unending needs and wants. With the replicator, then, human needs/wants occur not out of the appetite for rarity or ‘incentivised’ by the fluctuation of market forces, but the issue of needs/wants is instead generated and moderated by the individual user, who relies on their own common sense to understand what desire should be satisfied. The replicator, then, is not only a producer of goods, but also a producer of one’s moral sense of need over want, since the latter has been eradicated [4].

The replicator first appeared in Star Trek: The Next Generation [5], a series first aired in 1987, and incidentally (or not) coincides with America and Canada’s historic ratification of

the first Free Trade Agreement, the Black Monday Wall Street crash, Perestroika, and the first laying of optic fibre communication cables across the Atlantic. Most significantly, however, the replicator featured as a regular component of the television series throughout the concurrent rise of the Clinton administration.

Thus the imagination for and Star Trek’s continued development of the replicator emerges from a highly specific form of thinking: namely, the ‘new era’ desire to produce infinite surplus.

The 1990s ushered in the growing economic prowess of America, and the burgeoning technological economy of Silicone Valley cannot be ignored in this regard. While the Star Trek replicator appeared on television week in and out to transform leftover food into fake caviar and lungs, the Clinton administration produced the longest boom in US history, orchestrated in close collaboration with Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan.

This was the new era economy that had not only expanded by 50%, but also generated enough gross national product to comprise a quarter of the world’s economic output with a staggering budget surplus of $237 billion. As a consequence of the deregulation of the markets and the explosion of the internet, Greenspan’s initial concern that market growth was an ‘irrational exuberance’ (as it failed to create an increase in productivity) was hastily retracted. He attempted to ameliorate the dip in the markets by generating a selfcorrecting excuse that the newly networked market had ‘invented’ new forms of productivity so complex and diffuse that he couldn’t account for (or, more precisely, detect) their growth implications [6]. Just as the replicator produces a subject who can respond with self-regulated rational desires, so Greenspan spoke of a market that would self-regulate through computerised calculated risk-taking. Both would produce a surfeit of reproducible product; both were different forms of science fiction.

The replicator, of course, is not the first instance of a machine capable of material repeatability. Perhaps the earliest mention of self-replicating machines comes with Karel Čapek's play RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots) from 1921, while Primo Levi’s short story Order on the Cheap introduced a duplicating machine capable of creating order from disorder in 1966, and the ‘Santa Clause Machine’ surfaced as a debateable future in the 1970s. The earliest

Jesse Jones

Flag of the United Federation of Planets

example, however, may indeed be the Cornucopia, a horn of the goat Amaltheia that constantly refilled with food and drink. In each instance, the notion of a post-labour economy is presented as Thomas Moore’s utopia, though the mystical action of regeneration is reserved exclusively to that of mechanical technology by the 20th-century.

But let’s look again at the promise of the replicator: infinite surplus. This is an uncomfortable post-capitalism, since capitalism specifically seeks out surplus. Infinite surplus is immeasurable, unaccountable, without season, produced without labour and

Flag of the United Nations

thus without time. It collapses wants and needs into desire and thus seeks to establish a value that is ethical, not merely quantifiable. But this is not an entirely free economy; the replicator is itself a property of the Starfleet.

The production of ethics and products always has its regulator. | | |

The Replicator

Against the Realm of the Absolute |

Jesse Jones

[1] This essay is indebted to conversations with artist Danna Vajda, whose project Holodeck and Other Spaces, a collaboration with Willie Brisco, informed the arguments herein.

[2] Despite the series’ creator Gene Rodenberry insisting on the original Star Trek as a utopian imagining of global politics, the peaceful agenda of Star Trek’s Prime Directive (of non-violence and non-interference) is repeatedly ignored by the original series’ Captain Kirk, in favour of more aggressive confrontations with alien. Further, one cannot fail to notice the Klingons resemblance to a pantomime idea of a Mongol Horde, a species who stand in opposition to the ‘good sense’ of the Federation.

[3] The frontierism of the initial Star Trek series was not entirely subdued in the later series. It is not by accident, for example, that Benjamin Sisko referred to Deep Space 9 as ‘the most important piece of real estate in the Alpha Quadrant’, a thinly veiled attempt to convince his superiors to permit an aggressive military offensive.

[4] In contrast to the characteristic philosophical rationale of master tactician Captain Jean Luc Picard, the captain nonetheless undoes the replicator’s supposed eradication scarcity, by keeping a stash of ‘real’ caviar for special occasions.

[5] When thinking of the replicator at large, it’s interesting to consider that despite its long format and drama genre, Next Generation was surprisingly successful in finding firstrun syndication, and ran across a variety of networks that could insert advertising at their own choosing.

This was in opposition to the deficitfinancing model of single network loyalty. Next Generation remains one of the successfully syndicated shows in US television history.

[6] Adam Curtis’ recent documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, 2011, BBC, describes Greenspan’s warning and retraction as a key moment for the growth of deregulation that allowed hedging to become commonplace and widely accepted as a form of balancing the markets. | |

On Delinquency…

Jesse Jones.

Social action and the participation in our political reality in which we inscribe with ideas of agency and power often imply some sense of necessary action, an active dissent that may manifest gestures of protest or disrupt processes of capitalism. We may also think about our delinquency to the script of capital, the possibility of defaulting to our prescribed role within the economic structures that have been imposed upon us. Ireland’s current economic collapse has seen our entire political establishment bow to the demands of the International Monetary Fund, with a bailout plan that is set to lead the country into a decade of austerity, in which the vast majority of citizens are set to carry the burden of debt for farcical financial speculation of an elite few over the past decade.

But what are the possibilities of our defaulting or becoming delinquent to this imposed economic narrative?

In our delinquency can we liberate ourselves not only from this crippling financial strain, mass unemployment and emigration, but also through a movement of delinquency, create space for new realms of perception that allow us to experience the political in an entirely different way?

Jacque Ranciere, in his text The Politics of Aesthetics, described the social narrative in which we exist as ‘The distribution of the sensible’, meaning, ‘the implicit law governing the sensible order that parcels out places and forms of participation in a common world by first establishing the modes of perception within which these are inscribed. The distribution of the sensible thus produces a system of self-evident facts of perception based on the set of horizons and modalities of what is visible and audible as well as what can be said, thought, made or done. Distribution therefore refers to both forms of inclusion and forms of exclusion. The sensible of course does not refer to what shows good sense or judgement but to what is capable of being apprehended by the senses’.

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the sensible. This deliberate will of non-compliance to the aesthetic order of things occurs at various points in our cultural history and has vast repercussions to the seeding of possible modes of reality that might ensue.

In 1950s America, during modernity's perceived highest point of distribution, an aesthetic evolved from a generation of post-war teenagers. They defined a distinct cultural experience that was uniquely their own, through a delinquency to the ideals and morals of their parent’s generation. The boom period in the American economy led to an increase in the number of teens who had access to allowances from parents whom, having lived through almost a decade of war and rations, were eager to dote on their children.

Mass suburbanization and fetishism of the household in mass media and advertising led to an increased privatisation of family space to the domain of the home. Concurrently a surplus in income began allowances for teenagers, from which a new consumer economy emerged. The record industry and these teens now had the spending power to define a consumer culture of their own.

Jukebox venders and radio stations soon bent to the taste of this emergent generation as Alan Freed coined the term, rock and roll, a music which vented narratives of sexual curiosities and interracial cultural possibilities at a time when the American school system was still segregated.

The culture of delinquency was soon defined equally as a menace to the social order by reactionary figures such as J Edgar Hoover, who warned of juvenile delinquency and excessive crime. Alarmists such as Fredric

Wertham warned of the corrupting effects of violence in comic books and other popular forms of youth culture in his study, The Seduction of the Innocent from 1954. The sensory world created by the 1950s teenager ushered in the aesthetic culture of the ‘Beat Generation’. A culture that was entirely new and estranged from their parents’ realm of perception.

These teenagers had their own music, cinema, even language, opening a vast schism between themselves and their parents’ generation. This gap allowed for a space of imagination to emerge, that things could be otherwise. That a delinquency to the distribution of the sensible may be possible. This schism would become the fertile ground on which a countercultural movement of the later 1960s would sow its seeds of resistance. The rebellion against parental figures soon extended to a rebellion against patriarchy itself, and would become part of a mass movement to transform society. The roots to this counterculture were formed in the screen images of the 50s teen delinquent manifest in Nicolas Ray’s Rebel Without A Cause, made in 1955.

Rebel... critiques the most elemental facet of the ruling order of reality in 1950s America, the family. Seeing it not as a moral, wholesome and stable force, but rather, as a dark corrupting institution, one in which sinister Oedipal tendencies, alienation and victimisation are at play. At the heart of this is the hero Jim’s (played

by James Dean) failure to find an adequate father figure or symbol of authority. He is set to the task of forming an alternate world, an autonomous space of his own in which he can exist separately to ‘their’ rules and laws of the sensible. However, a fundamental conservatism exists within the rebellion. Jim wants

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What Ranciere highlights is that in order to re-draw these aesthetic boundaries and create new territories of perception, we must first acquire the power to disseminate and distribute that new visual and sensory experience. This counter-aesthetic world can forge a strong dissenting force to the dominant distribution of

Against the Realm of the Absolute | Workshops | March 2011

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to be emancipated through his own enforcement of masculine strength.

His rebellion sees him create an alternative pseudo-family world, high in the hills in the abandoned mansion of a former Hollywood star. The mansion is repossessed by the characters Plato, Jim and Judy, for whom paternal abandonment is the main psychological compulsion feeding their resistance.

François Truffaut said at the time of Dean’s iconography, ‘In James Dean, today’s youth discovers itself through the eternal adolescent love of tests, trials, intoxication, pride and regret at feeling outside society, refusal and desire to become integrated and finally, acceptance or refusal of the world as it is.’

Two years previously, Laszilo Benedeks’s The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando as part of a rebel motorcycle gang that terrorises a small town, offered a case for nomadic non-conformity. In fact it is the small town that equally terrorises its visitors, but it is the contrast between their divergent modes of reality that now casts each into bas-relief. The small American town now feels even smaller and conservative as seen through the eyes of its new and transient inhabitants.

The rebels, for whom mobility is epitomized by the motorcycle itself, seem more transgressive. They are not rooted in a place, but rather it is the bond of the tribe of fellow motorcyclists that becomes their social definition of place. It is this transposition of the authority of the tribe from family and institutional powers such as schools, and fundamentally the state, which most describes the power and threat of the modes of delinquency in the 1950s. This new affiliative tribe could make up their own code of order, one that did not prescribe to the roles previously required of them. However, it is the role of women within the delinquency narrative that is least attended to, except for the titillating B-movie romps such as High School Hell Cats and Reform School Girl. The binaries of good girl / bad girl are still very much at play and no complexity arises that may give a divining rod to the precipices of a feminist counterculture that would arise in the ensuing decade. Although the men in the delinquent narrative have agency and can form tribal bonds within the group, the women cannot form these relations, they require a male caretaker to escort them through these new realms of aesthetic possibility.

In Kent MacKenzie’s film The Exiles, made from 1958 - 1961, we see a lone woman wander through the

Against the Realm of the Absolute |

desolate streets of Bunker Hill in downtown LA. Wife to a delinquent husband, for whom the endless night is his playground, she is left to watch projected fictional lives in an allnight movie house before wandering home alone. MacKenzie’s film is by far one of the most important films made in this entire period, if not the last 50 years. However, it is one of the least known. It exists on the margins, a type of exile within itself.

of us. Like the character of Brando in The Wild One, we may answer to the question ‘What are you rebelling against?’ ... ‘What have you got?’

Made on the margins of the Hollywood film industry, MacKenzie’s stark realism stands in contrast to the dream factory of the established studios. The Exiles follows a group of Native Americans living in the now disappeared district of Bunker Hill over 12 hours of durational, yet rapid paced documentary fiction cinema.

The world of neon lights, drag races and all-night parties - stock mise en scène to the delinquent teen flick, now plays a sombre back-drop to a group of unlikely delinquents. Far from the blonde all-American Dean or the hyper-masculine caricatures of Brando, the band of delinquent chicano and Native American protagonists play hookie on a world in which they have no place, economically or politically. The aesthetic terrain of the 1950s teen with its rock and roll and jukebox jockeys with spitfire slang, become the last refuge of a disappearing nation within a nation.

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For the delinquents in The Exiles, their non-compliance to the script of American Modernity is alas a failed poetic swan song to a community that is dissolving into the cracks of Los Angeles. For them delinquency has come too late. To be delinquent we must choose our timing well, not wait until we have already been pushed to the peripheries, but rather create the schism within the centre.

It is within this centre that the rupture to the dominant distribution of reality is most effective. It is from here its repercussions will be felt. Yet delinquency is not an end in itself, it must be pursued with the intention to fulfill its anti-establishment potential. The recent labeling of the economically delinquent countries in the EU such as Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain, as ‘The Pigs’, seeks to demonize our deviant economic behavior, branding us with a kind of fiscal ASBO. The possibility of our resistance to this emerging tiered European patriarchy presents us with a beginning from which to embark, a departure that through our delinquency we might forge new realms of aesthetic, political and social realities that will break or default from what is merely expected

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set

Jesse Jones

up

They started with two I missed them but then I caught up and I feel more informed, but I didn't think about the black ____ I would contend with later

| It's all in my ears. | I think I missed the best one, borne of what?

Walking with tightly hairdried film and wait!

Get out of my way, man! White suits don't equal (Scottish) power! I will get up that hill running in heels I know not very – oh

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Women are privilege, or, females is trouble. The under // other It's easy to confuse them [ those upon a donkey of psychoanalysis, acid singing free love to the real world. Arden, Arden! Your ladies are in plain sacks, playing with mirrors, playing out to nature look at me, man!

I'm free! I'm angry! I'm still your

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-oh it's funny how men like her better I guess

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Future Capital Ash Reid responds to her experiences as a workshop contributor and Mirroress.

Anyway, it doesn't match our present experience. Except does it? Is this group therapy? What are our roles?

Are you there?

ROLLING

It was early or possibly just very late, however you look at it, it was dark and the dusk dawn crossover reflected nothing, only your teeth and your system you are in my at least the coal is and it’s all over my boyfriend’s jacket zzzzzzzzzz And the others I said do they exist - existing is only inside the inner space or so said Ballard by way of Barnes – oh how very. What is it that led us here?

We’ve watched a bunch of films now, we know where it all went wrong. [do we] Dreams don’t happen once you’ve passed ripeness and the only road trip left is death.

Lacan! you sexist pig you. A hooded mirror does not mean anything when there’s four of you and a hill that needs conquered by Jane and her band of penises.

Anyway. Interior. Jeanne was driven to it, but it was too easy a conclusion to male/make. I laugh, shot in the home. Jeanne, does your son really allude to Freud? very A stool was missed out once too often in those kitchen settings. We are enraptured by the mundane and sssshhhhhhhhh Move on.

Sync.

Another landscape, this time open, still grey, the white suits now white cars creeping into the final shot.

Cut. Dust conjured up a devil in the empty lagoon and we covered our eyes with that phallus for protection.

Ho. My ears are still black.

S e x and Capitalism, my friend, my enemy. A utopian chiasma of sorts, A B B A Jameson vs MT's lack of an alternative. Women of the world, take ?

I don’t feel like a Marxist, but then, still.

Against the Realm of the Absolute | Production shot | April 2011

Against the Realm of the Absolute |

Jesse Jones

Against the Realm of the Absolute | 16mm Film Still | Jesse Jones | 2011

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Against the Realm of the Absolute | 16mm Film Still | Jesse Jones | 2011

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Against the Realm of the Absolute |

Jesse Jones

Against the Realm of the Absolute | 16mm Film Still | Jesse Jones | 2011

Credits Against the Realm of the Absolute was commissioned and produced by Collective.

The project developed over a ten-month period and included a residency in Edinburgh. Public events, film screenings and discussions culminated in the production of a 16mm film, premiered at Collective as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2011.

Featuring : Jill Brown Katie Crook Jeanne dARK Rachel King

Tessa Lynch Tess Mitchell Ash Reid Hatt Reiss Anne-Sophie Roger Bec Sharp Jasmine Bray Triance Fiona Watt With thanks to : Nick Aitken Neil Cooper Rosalie Doubal Fiona Jardine Isla Leaver-Yap Production Team : Jesse Jones

Kate McCullough | DOP Eanna de Buis | Camera Assistant / Focus Pull Angus McPake | Sound Kate Gray | Collective Director Jenny Richards | Project Manager Geraldine Heaney | Production Assistant Murray Ferguson | Production Assistant Neil Ogg | Production Assistant Supported by : Scottish Power

East Lothian Council Filmbase Ireland RuaRED Edinburgh International Film Festival Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Funded by : Creative Scotland Edinburgh City Council Also screening during Against the Realm of the Absolute [Part I] 11|06|11 - 24|06|11 : Born In Flames | Lizzie Borden | 1983 Privilege | Yvonne Rainer | 1990