Page 261 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

CONCLUSION
If Ici et Ailleurs is infused with déjà vu, is locked into a system of'relevance' and so remains susceptible
to this process of neutralisation even as it identifies it, your methods seem resistant. The Buñuelian
underground continues to test, challenge and reject the norms. Ho w can it not? The 'coercively
neutralising [of] difference' can itself be sublimated, heightening the resultant critique of society. 'Go
ahead!' you say, 'attempt to eradicate that which is problematic and unacceptable.' We can watch
it coming; our vantage point is that of Simon, in Simón del desierto {Simon of the Desert, 1965): the
visions, hallucinations and temptations are ultimately perceived to be just those things - and things
drawn primarily from ourselves, in relation to society.
This vantage point offers a measure of pre-emption of the attack outlined by Hardt and Negri in
the way in which the front of resistance now incorporates the battle for images and the limitations of
the context from which we draw their meanings. We no longer live in an epoch defined by images,
but one in which images continually attempt to define the contours of the epoch, as Baudrillard has
argued.21 So the battle is over the rematerialisation of meaning in the realm of the virtual - the fight
for the suggestion of a suprasensible idea that works to explain. I take this state of affairs, in itself, as
evidence of a crisis. A n d for this, you have equipped us with a weapon: the problematic image as a
visualisation of the empirical-phenomenological 'truth', since it is 'looked-at-from' from the position
of an objective awareness of the incredible fragility of the fantasmatic foundation of the imperial
machine. Since this fragility can no longer be directly manifest, it remains sublime - the element that
continually suggests itself in the light of the necessity for a battle for 'meaning' in the first place, or
suggests the failure of the attempts to invoke that element.
So, when we unavoidably encounter the systemic lineaments of a nightmare vision as evidence of
the extent of psychic injury in the face of oppression rather than the given and apparent 'definition' of
the enemy (by those who have infiltrated it), we are more inclined to believe the nightmare vision is a
'real simulation'. This Buñuelian 'underground' sensibility denies us the degree of blindness required
to do otherwise. The Thing (the given suprasensible Idea) then fails to resonate since our standpoint
remains closer to that of the impartial observer than the crisis-ridden oppressor. And in this way your
work continues to represents a front of resistance in, and a model for, this emancipatory endeavour.

Yours fraternally,

B H

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