film & cats.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi

- Evil Does Not Exist

They're banking on us quieting down.

But as a reminder to all, a few days of pausing the violence is NOT what we advocate for; we demand to cease all forms of violence, cease the genocide, cease the occupation, cease the apartheid system and most importantly seek justice.

One of my longest standing #thots on film criticism is that the text itself is sometimes not sufficient enough as a critic of a film.

There is no cognitive dissonance here. Paramount made Killers of the Flower Moon to make money and to make someone’s producer son an Oscar nominee. They don’t care about the Osage murders. They care about the profitability of it. At the same time Israel is necessary, as a glorified US military base, to maintain US hegemonic power and thus economic power, which Paramount benefits from. So of course Paramount supports Israel and its subsidiaries like CBS Entertainment Group are going to cut zionist propaganda.

My post is about how capital and empire are entwined in ways we don't normally think about, in this case movie production. It tries to explain how a company releasing a film about indigenous murder while it funds indigenous murder is not contradictory.

The identitarian and representational politics im talking about is in reference to this phenomenon. That's why i qualified it with liberal. There is nothing wrong with identity politics or representation but they are easily weaponized by liberals to show "progress" has been made even as they aid and abet the fascism that erodes such progress. Consumption, in this context, has no material benefit. Paramount also has a storied history of producing anti-indigenous movies, so I'd be wary of this movie even if paramount didn’t donate a million to israel.

This film, about indigenous genocide, is relevant because it is being released at a time when Israel is genociding an indigenous population and the company which produced the film is funding that genocide. I don't think paramount is releasing any other film about indigenous people right now so why would anyone be talking about other paramount releases?

Indigenous media, across the globe, is vast and vibrant. ive written about and taught the Zapatistas use of new media; ive lectured about the Navajo using movie dubbing and subtitling as language preservation; when i teach Third Cinema i include Grupo Ukamau; and ive taught the history and politics of Palestinian cinema in Gaza, the West Bank, and throughout the diaspora. All of these histories are hardly indicative of the scope and longevity of indigenous cinema. Indigenous people don't need Scorsese to tell their history.

I hope people learn more about indigenous americans. But i don’t think just watching a narrative interpretation of a nonfiction book by a major studio is going to teach much. I think it’s more helpful to read indigenous authors and to befriend indigenous people.

"I’m better off alone, because I happen to be a human being born with an extremely thin skin, and that’s not very good in this world."