SESSION 85, ILLEGAL_CINEMA

Screening of The Girls of Kamare (René Viénet, 1974), proposed by Yen Noh and Sven Lütticken and followed by discussion.

René Viénet’s film The Girls of Kamare is largely based on the Japanese film Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom. A former member of the Situationist International and Sinologist, Viénet had already performed a détournement (a critical appropriation) of a martial arts film from Hong Kong under the title Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1972). For his second film, he turned his attention to the Japanese genre of “pink” films. With the original film having been characterized as a “dizzying combination of prison-movie archetypes, social satire, and S & M-fueled kink,” Viénet’s détournement adds new scenes as well as subtitles that attack the spectacle and the state, structuralism and Maoism. Yen and Sven will screen the film while détourning it in turn, adding some thoughts on the possibilities for unlawful alliance of micro-life-forces that take shape and mobilize at all political levels within and against the neoliberal state-corporate machine.

The Girls of Kamare first came to mind after Yen and Sven watched Nagisa Oshima’s film In the Realm of the Senses (1976) whose porno-graphic disruption of the body exceeds and transgresses imperial militarism by way of “automated sexuality.” Yen is currently a resident artist at Bulegoa z/b with her proposal The Im/possible Avant-Garde: Can We Talk About MAVO?. She is in the process of completing her thesis DidLineMurderCircle, And Run to the Lowest Paradise on Korean poet, artist, and architect Yi Sang, whose run to the “Lowest Paradise” is an escape from Korea’s colonial modernity—performed together with his partner Geumhong, a sex worker. Next month Sven will be co-convening a week of talks, training sessions, and discussions at BAK in Utrecht under the title Deserting from the Culture Wars, exploring ways to get out of the reactive in relation to neofascist cultural warfare.