James Ferraro told me he’s working on a Wagnerian opera…

Read the full interview over at Thump

A Knife, A Fork & A Spoon Will Beat Out a Happy Tune

Kanye West, we are told, will dine only with the very finest of cutlery. "Everything is the best quality." His knives and forks, apparently, are made of gold. I wonder, does he play the spoons with his golden spoons?

When, in 1967, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were asked to create a new signature tune for Radio Sheffield, David Cain, thinking of the city's steel industry, called for knives and forks. His thirty-second jingle was composed from the plucked tines of steel forks, recorded onto tape and sped up or slowed down for different pitches.

Perhaps Peter Sinfield, former lyricist to King Crimson, ELP, and Bucks Fizz, was thinking along similar lines when he composed this - a "music for impossible cutlery":

More often, however, the relationship between notes and knives, or tunes and tines is less harmonious, betraying moreover a certain anxiety best illustrated by two famous quotations.

Wagner is supposed to have said that when he hears Mozart he sometimes fancies he can hear the clatter of the Emperor's dinnerware interfering with the music ("Contemporary attitudes towards the musical inheritance suffer," claimed Adorno, "from the fact that no-one has the confidence to be so disrespectful.")

Erik Satie might almost have had this slur in mind when he turned to Fernand Léger one evening over dinner and stated the need for a "furniture music, that is to say, music that would be a part of the surrounding noises and that would take them into account. I see it as melodious, as masking the clatter of knives and forks without drowning it completely, without imposing itself."

I saw anxiety because both of these quotations suggest that there are at least certain circumstances when music might be forced to compete with other, more pressing activities. Wagner's remark might be regarded as the symptom of a time when feudal patronage was waning as a source of income for composers. Satie's of the burgeoning of another time, when mechanical reproduction and increased time for leisure was making music both more ubiquitous and less venerated than it had been. 

The irony, perhaps, is that when Satie went ahead and created his musique d'ameublement the audience refused to ignore it and listened in silence; while Wagner's music would become the template for the unheard melodies soundtracking a thousand Hollywood films.

Whatever Satie may have had in mind when he made his comment to Léger, I'm fairly sure it wasn't this ...

Music, Sound and Time in Bruno Dumont's Hors Satan

Early on in the new film by former philosophy teacher, Bruno Dumont, Alexandra Lematre's character (identified only as "elle") takes an in-ear headphone from the pocket of her hoodie and slips it in her ear. We, the audience are never made privvy to the music she listens to, but the gesture draws attention to the absence of music in the film. As traditionally defined, there is no music in Hors Satan - no silken Hollywood strings, no pop songs, no diegetic performance, no non-diegetic score. Even the kind of sonic re-structuring usually handled by a sound editor is missing, for Dumont did not hire one.

No music, nor very much dialogue either - and most of that which there is is largely inconsequential. But Hors Satan is not a silent film. Far from it. We hear birds tweeting, cocks crowing, leaves rustling, as well as several more revealing sounds - a camera dolly rolling over its track, the wind blowing against a microphone.

In an interview with Jean-Michel Frodon, the director explains, "We recorded only live and "mono" sounds. What you hear in the film are the actual sounds recorded during shooting. I didn't alter or re-record them. I wish some noises weren't there, but I kept them anyway, stoically. . . The sound material is very rich and untamed. Therefore, when there is a moment of silence, you can feel it loud and clear."

At one moment, after it has been raining, we hear water running over a corrugated iron roof and falling to the ground. The two main characters pause in their journey to watch and listen, and we listen with them. These characters frequently take time out to simply stand still and pay attention to some ambient sound. And even in their absence, the camera will likewise pursue such sounds to their sources, becoming, in the process, a character like them. Sound - and a certain quasi-musical attentiveness to sound - thus subjectivizes, and in so doing constructs an audience that will be willing, like the film's characters to offer a certain attentiveness toward sounds, to give them time, without preconceptions.

How can we describe the sense of time experienced in the films of Bruno Dumont? It is certainly very far from the clock-time of Hitchcock, the almost Taylorist efficiency with which narrative details are revealed and slotted into the perpetual motion machine of the diegesis in North by North West or The Man Who Knew Too Much, for example. We find with Dumont a concern with rhythm and tempo that goes beyond brute functionalism, and there is evidently something musical in this. But neither are we dealing with the languorous time of Apichatpong Weerasthakul, nor the deep time of Bela Tarr, which would be something like the Erfahrung of Walter Benjamin.

Karlheinz Stockhausen once remarked that "Wagner, more than any other western composer, expanded the timing of western music: he would have been the best gagaku composer." While the first half of this statement is undoubtedly true, I'm not so sure about the second half. Think of the constantly held back, teetering sense of anticipation, of desperate yearning for an impossible fulfillment, found in Tristan und Isolde. Perhaps I am wrong, but I suspect this is something foreign to the Japanese gagaku tradition. But maybe not so much to the cinema of Bruno Dumont - even if only to an earlier film such as Twenty-Nine Palms, in which the palpable sense of dread, of waiting for some seemingly inevitable horror hangs suspended in each crawling take, like the infinitely delayed resolution of some dissonance in the middle voices.

Hors Satan is different in this respect. The shot lengths are generally shorter than in his earlier films (though still considerably longer than most mainstream films), the forward motion of the narrative less precipitous. Perhaps this film is closer to the sense of time alluded to in Stockhausen's reference to gagaku.

In his book, Haunted Weather, David Toop, in the midst of a discussion about contemporary Japanese electronica, describes this 7th and 8th century court music which, he says, survives largely unchanged to this day, "So measured in the progress of its percussive markers that it draws the image of a footstep raised to move forward yet caught in a universal power cut, gagaku's timbral consistency is a gaseous astringency of reeds, flutes and free reeds."

Toop quotes William P. Malm's book on Japanese Music and Musical Instruments, which claims that the chords of the sho bamboo reed pipe do not serve the functions of tension and release allotted to western functional harmony, "Rather, they 'freeze' the melody. They are like a vein of amber in which a butterfly has been prepared. We see the beauty of the creature within but at the same time are unaware of a transparent solid between us and the object, a solid of such a texture that it shows that object off in a very special way."

Stockhausen discovered gagaku music when he travelled to Japan in 1966 to complete his Telemusik at the NHK electronic music studios, where composers like Toshiro Mayuzumi and Makoto Maroi had been creating electronic music for over a decade. Mayuzumi would score over a hundred films, including several by Imamura and Mizoguchi, both of whom are renowned for their long takes and slow, refined pacing.

Despite the sometimes austere titles, Mayuzumi's electronic music, such as 1953's X,Y,Z for musique concrète, (contemporary with Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry's concrète opera, Orphée 53), exhibits a kind of delirious playfulness, equal parts hallucinogenic Looney Tunes pandemonium and delirious melodrama, as pitch-shifted horns and bird tweets give way to echoplexed weeping.

Moroi and Mayuzumi's collaborative work, Variations on 7, is, however, more restrained, with a much greater economy of means, while still remaining very different from either the French concrète of Schaeffer and Henry or the sine tone based electronic music of Stockhausen and Eimert in Cologne. "One probably reason why this work seems to compelling and relevant now," says David Toop, "is the directness, the clarity, the sense of pure intent."

And this last seems to me a good description of the attraction of Dumont's film-making. He is one of the few directors working today willing to impose restrictions upon himself, to act with a strict economy of tools and means. Utilising a restricted repertoire of shot lengths, camera heights, and angles. Even if his short lengths were to be reduced much further, there would still be a certain sense of slowness to his film because there is none of the usual digital busyness of superimposed sonic and visual detail (/clutter). He does this without nostalgia: there is nothing old-fashioned looking - or sounding - about his films. But there is this sense of "propriety" as he says of Alexendra Lematre's performance. And the drama comes from the disproportion between this propriety, this certain holding back, a resistance to express even, and the sometimes quite startling events which unfold; events which in another context, filmed in another way, might seem, as Dumont says in the above cited interview, quite normal. This is the source of Dumont's "slap in the face"; a slap which is in many ways very musical. Like a snare drum erupting in the midst of a performance of John Cage's 4'33''.

The Future For Sale; or, How Jules Verne Predicted the Browne Report

“It must be confessed that the study of belles lettres and of ancient languages (including French) was at this time virtually obsolete; Latin and Greek were not only dead languages but buried as well; for form's sake, some classes in literature were still taught, though these were sparsely attended and inappreciable – indeed anything but appreciated.” So we read in a prophecy by Jules Verne of Paris in the Twentieth Century, discovered just a decade and a half ago, yet written a century and a half ago, since locked away in a vault for safe-keeping.

Amongst the ubiquitous electric lighting, horseless carriages, and other marvels anticipated in Verne's tales of the future, we are informed of the Academic Credit Union – a national education system operated according to the principles of the Crédit Mobilier and other national banking concerns run as joint stock operations, still relatively new to France at the time the book was written. Proportional to the collapse in literary studies the Academic Credit Union precipitates, we find a boom time for civil engineering, mechanics, physics, and finance; “whatever,” Verne tells us, “concerned the market tendencies of the day.”

In the 1860s it was an absurdist satire to suggest the conquest of education by the norms of the banking trade – today it seems increasingly to be accepted common sense. From the Browne Report's recommendation of stripping funding to the arts and humanities, to new plans from universities in Leicester, Durham and London to award students for their 'corporate skills', business is increasingly the paradigm for academia. And as Verne's nightmare becomes a reality, any qualification not immediately conducive to turning a profit seems destined to beg the question, from press and public alike, of why the state should be asked to foot the bill.

In its time, Jules Verne's dystopia was a rare voice of despair – rejected by his publisher as implausible - in a century characterised by the overwhelming optimism of its literary predictions. For the utopian writers of Victorian times, the nation's responsibility towards the life and culture of its citizens, quite apart from any considerations of profit or business sense, was pivotal. From Richard Wagner's demand for a state-financed opera theatre, free to all comers, to Edward Bellamy's promise of a citizen's credit allowance, corresponding to an equal share of the nation's annual product; the futurists of the industrial age would regard the modern belief in individualism as little short of barbarism.

“There is no such thing in a civilized society as self-support,” insists Bellamy's man of the future. “Every man, however solitary may seem his occupation, is a member of a vast industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support.” Looking Backward, written in 1887 but set in the year 2000, was enormously popular at the time, spawning dozens of sequels and responses, and even a number of intentional communities.

Though it may be tempting to scoff at yesterday's dreams of a bright future, it is worth recalling that it is precisely this utopian impulse that led to the establishment in Britain, not just of universal free education, but also - and at a time when the nation's finances were far worse off than they are now - a national health service and welfare system.

Since the twin nihilisms of punk's 'no future' and Thatcher's 'no such thing as society', utopian thought has been thin on the ground. Where we do find glints of optimism in the mainstream media, it is a faith, not in any national or international state, conceived as a community of common interest, but in private corporations and individuals to provide for us. This is the message both of David Cameron's 'Big Society' and Wired editor Chris Anderson's book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. What is new about Anderson's 'free' is not its gratuitousness, but the question of who is to foot the bill.

For the internet's techno-utopians, everything can be free, paid for not by a redistributive tax system but by advertising. The price we pay is that our most intimate discourse - chatting on Facebook or Gmail, making mixtapes for friends on Spotify - is thoroughly permeated by direct marketing, as though our mobile phone calls were constantly being interrupted by targeted radio ads. So yesterday's dystopia becomes today's supposed utopia, and hope for the future becomes a commodity to be sold at market price.

[image: Gilles Roman, from this website]

Opera Houses

Driving out of Oslo, from its shiny glass and steel centre towards a country that still doesn't really have anything you could call a motorway and only 60 km of high speed rail (principally, from Oslo to Oslo Airport), one is offered a panoramic view of rapidly encroaching modernisation. From the soon-to-be-replaced E18 highway, overlooking the once-rundown dockland area of Bjørvika, you can see that the only thing separating the enormous 1960s container port from the "€500 million stone behemoth" (Icon) of the new opera house is a wasteland of cranes, half-built bridges, and projects in-development. Google "Bjørvika" today and you'll be offered an awful lot of hotel rooms and not much else.

A great deal of very interesting stuff has been written about container ports as vectors of contemporary capital, heralds of the hypermodern, in the wake of series two of The Wire. The curious thing about driving out of Oslo, however, is that it draws your attention to what might otherwise seem an absurd collocation: container ports and opera houses.

Baron Hatherley suggested to me, via email (well, Facebook actually...), that, "Opera and ornament do seem linked in some manner..." But although Oslo Opera House's architects, Snøhetta, may be most famous for the super-ornamental new Alexandria Library (dismissed by Charles Jencks here), this particular building doesn't really evoke either the swishy expressionism of Zaha Hadid, nor the "doily-tecture" pooh-poohed in Douglas Murphy's post on the Shanghai Expo. Actually, particularly from behind, the Operahuset has a rather South Bank-esque stark blockiness to it. It's an edifice, "a rogue iceberg" as the Icon piece linked above puts it, "crashed into the eastern edge of Oslo's harbour." It resembles in some ways a cracked open freight container - or a series of them, badly stacked, as if by some automated robotic crane gone haywire.

Markedly similar in its jutting frame - if somewhat more decorative in the detail of its surfaces - is Copenhagen Opera House. Completed three years earlier than Oslo's, in 2004, the Operaen occupies a similar space in the city's harbour, separated form the container port only by an expanse of empty polluted land that was, last year, the subject of a Reclaim the Streets-style action. Reffen, described as a "utopian building project," involved the temporary occupation of the land by "constructors" who built ad-hoc dwellings out of found materials. If anything, the link between the opera house and the port is made even more explicit in Copenhagen by the fact that the $500 million required to build it were donated by Maersk, the largest container ship and supply vessel operator in the world.

How to make sense of this juxtaposition of the totally inhuman face of freight transportation with perhaps the quintessential humanist art? Of course, there is an issue of gentrification, which was the focus of the Reffen occupation. And of the attempt to paper over (and launder the proceeds of) "dirty" industry with supposedly elevated culture, which we might relate to the presence of the Cité de la Musique and Parc de la Villette in Paris at the site of the old (pre-containerisation) Port de la Villette, glimpsed in Jean Vigo's poetic realist masterpiece L'Atalante. I would by no means wish to diminish the force of such explanations with the perhaps more figurative exploration that follows.

An hour's walk, south of La Villette, will take you to the Opéra Bastille, a building which, as much as the Oslo Operahuset, seems to invite the public onto its great slopes and surfaces as much as it lurchingly imposes itself on its surroundings. A project initiated in 1968 by Pierre Boulez and inaugurated on the bicentenary of the storming of the Bastille, it is significant that the very site of the violent surging forth of the modern world should be marked by an opera house.

Opera may be associated in public consciousness with fusty old-fashioned ideas, and of course it is true that the form became established in the baroque period and the first opera houses were built at this time - even many late-nineteenth century opera houses were built in a neo-baroque style (so the esteemed Mr Hatherley is, of course, right, as usual). But the rococo was really a period of opera's sedimentation and formalisation. As a genre, it emerged out of the Renaissance and arguably flowered into maturity in the revolutionary period from the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, broadly between Gluck and Wagner. Revolutionary governments in France and Russia placed enormous stress on the importance of opera (to Lenin, it was second in importance, amongst the arts, only to cinema).

As Gary Tomlinson points out, "No artistic genre... has more often called for purgation," no genre has so frequently called for its own transformation and reformation, no genre has spoken so much and so consistently about its own future. One of the major vectors of this permanent revolution is its relation to the notion of the human - principally in terms of the voice as the medium of operatic truth. From the Florentine Camerata's development of monody to emphasise the solo melodic line of the individual subject, through the successive reforms of Gluck, Cherubini and Spontini in France, placing greater emphasis on the massed singing of the chorus and away from the virtuoso soloist, and on into the twentieth century.

Over the last century, from Berg's Wozzeck to Birtwistle's Minotaur, the operatic voice has become increasingly monstrous and inhuman. In the midst of which we find Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry's musique concrète opera, Orphée 53. The only fragment of this last I have been able to find is Henry's Le Voile d'Orphée, which was later used standalone as the music to a Maurice Bejart ballet. In this fragment, the voice emerges only at the end, painfully rupturing the already fraught texture of Alan Splet-esque electronic ululations, barking the Greek Orphic hymn like Marinetti, only transfigured and distorted by concrète tape manipulation techniques. Orpheus, the emblematic figure of the opera, moves from voice as transcendence to voice as trauma.

The roots of the new anti- and/or post-humanism of twentieth century opera are to be found in the music-dramas of Richard Wagner, where for the first time, the orchestra itself becomes a privileged vehicle of the truth, in competition with the voice. It may be no coincidence that, today, the most recognisable element of the Ring Cycle is the so-called Wurm-Motiv that accompanies Alberich's transformation into a dragon with slow menacing tritones. From Max Steiner's (1933) music for King Kong to the alien invasion cycles of the 50s and 60s, various subtle transformations of this Wurm-Motiv became the go-to riff for virtually all movie monsters.

Faith on Earth is a Thing of the Past : Le Vaisseau Fantôme at the Opéra Bastille

As the Vorspiel draws to a close, the curtain rises on a vast pale room. Stage left stands a vastly proportioned door which will make dwarves of the protagonists (and giants of their shadows), stage right a kind of frame within which shimmers the image of a woman gazing dutifully up at a painting of a storm. The curious insubstantiality of this image, its coved frame, raise the question whether this image of an image is itself a filmed projection (for soon we see the woman within shift her posture slightly), or perhaps (as we soon discover to be the case) sheltered behind a scrim. Is this woman but a dream dreamt by the present scene, herself dreaming of a ship lost on stormy seas - a ship that we soon discover ourselves, as sailors bearing ropes come marching through the great door, to be aboard? Towards the end we will find ourselves questioning the reality status of this painting once more, as lighting effects expose the audience to a collectivised Stendhal Syndrome.

Richard Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer (rendered in French as Le Vaisseau Fantôme), as performed last night at the Opéra Bastille in Paris, is an opera at the crossroads (meeting the devil, perhaps?), an opera of counterpoint and contradiction. Composed in the early 1840s after a tumultuous sea voyage across the Norwegian fjords, undertaken to escape his creditors, (but inspired just as much by a satirical tale by Heinrich Heine), Wagner no doubt sympathised with the sea captain Daland's willingness to offer up his daughter, Senta, to the Dutchman in exchange for his treasure.

Written, then, in something of a hurry, in the hope (vain, as it happened) of escaping penury, The Flying Dutchman lies midway between classical opera and Wagner's later mature style and contains elements of both. Performed last night (as it frequently is) absolutely continuously, without breaks between its three acts, and yet with clearly defined arias to disrupt the smooth flow of arioso. There is even at times, such as the early dialogue between Daland and the Dutchman, something approaching secco recitative, yet punctuated by chords far more caustic than anything you might find in Handel or Mozart. It is also contains some of Wagner's earliest uses of leitmotifs, and remains the earliest of his operas to have been performed at Bayreuth.

Generically, though based on a comedy, the story is a tragedy, yet its hero sings bass (with nothing of the buffo about him) with a ghostly tremolo, serving to emphasise the weak, effeminacy of his rival for Senta's affections, Erik (a tenor). A love story whose lovers scarcely touch, embracing only twice (both times within the same scene) and but fleetingly. They seem to spend most of their time divided by the vast blankness of the stage, looking away from each other, scarcely capable even of seeing each other. At one point they seem to almost pass through each other, both as ethereal, as insubstantial as each other. As Senta lays dying she clings not to the Dutchman's body but to his portrait, in love more with the myth than the man.

In stark contrast to the lush warmth of the orchestration, the mise-en-scene and lighting was all cool minimalism in blues and greys. Even as the lights brighten in the second act, it is the harsh winterlight of a Bergman film (fitting its Scandinavian setting). My companion and I found ourselves comparing the staging (by German theatre director, Willy Decker) several times to the cinema. Most conspicuously, with its obtusely projected stage, long shadows and acute forced perspective, to German expressionism. Before the Dutchman's first appearance on dry land, we see for a long time his shadow, projecting from the door jamb. The image recalls nothing so much as Dr Caligari's somnambulist, Cesare.

From its opening storm to its Hoffmann-esque themes of the uncanny intrusion of the supernatural into the quotidian domestic sphere, The Flying Dutchman may be the ultimate romantic opera, the very apogee of romantic art. But in pushing romantic illusionism and suspension of disbelief to its limits, it seems to leap out of its frame (like the jutting stage itself) and force a certain self-doubt, a radical questioning of its own artifice which looks to the future in more than one direction. Last night's performance may have offered us a dream within a dream, a dream that dreams itself in an endless strange loop, still, for all its spectral shimmer, it retained a certain crisp clarity. Like lucid dreaming, it offered the dreamer the chance to become aware of its own reverie, thus offering the utopian possibility of infinite transformation.

Are they by any chance related? I think we should be told.

Franz Liszt
William Hartnell (as Dr Who)

Come to think of it ...

Richard Wagner

Jon Pertwee (the Third Doctor)

and even ...

Ludwig van Beethoven

Colin Baker (the Sixth Doctor)

This one is perhaps a little more tenuous ...

Pierre Schaeffer

Patrick Troughton (the Second Doctor)

Now I'm really scraping the barrel ...

Gustav Holst

Peter Davison (the Fifth Doctor)

Ferruccio Busoni

Tom Baker (the Fourth Doctor)

Avatar: Humane, More or Less

James Cameron's Avatar resembles, in its structure and function, a porno movie. But, just as Baise Moi does not resemble pornography because of the sex (no porn director who wished to continue working in the industry would film sex as badly as Mlles Despentes and Trinh Thi have managed), Avatar isn't like porn because most of the cast spend most of their time wearing slightly less than their underwear. After all, like many a fine cock tease, there is always a stray frond to cover a nipple when need be. No, Avatar can be compared to pornography more in the way everything revolves around, and is so relentlessly subjugated to, a limited number of 'money shots' scattered throughout the picture (floating mountains, flying dragons, and so forth). The acting is frequently poor, camera moves occasionally awkward, dialogue a mesh of cliches ("There's no such thing as an ex-marine," &c.), and the backstory is dispensed with immediately and perfunctorily in voice-over, so we can get as quickly as possible on to the familiar old story of the occupying soldier who, when he goes to sleep, fantasizes about erotic adventures with the native women.

In the phantasy space of the Na'vi's home, it is not just our hero who inhabits a computer-generated 'avatar' but just as much the music. Scenes around the space station generally follow a kind of standard, post-Hans Zimmer general MIDI neo-classicism. Once Jake dons the blue face of his Na'vi avatar, however, the magic of digital sequencing transforms the operatic western European motifs - a letter writer to Private Eye pointed out the similarities to Prokofiev's War and Peace, one could equally cite Rachmaninov's 1st Symphony and Wagner's Ring cycle, as hinted at by the army helicopters using the call sign, "Valkyrie" - into the kind of diaphonous worldbeat familiar from Barclaycard adverts (YouTube has even put one of those old Barclaycard ads in the 'Related Videos' if you look up the music clip from Avatar).

James Horner, thanks to previous Cameron collaboration Titanic, one of the most commercially successful composers of the 20th century, is somewhat notorious for his 'borrowings'. Alex Ross notes a sprig of Schostakovitch in Aliens, a soupcon of Schumann in Willow, and readers of Film Score Monthly have been known to sneer at his inability to mask such plagiarism. With Titanic, despite no Irish connections in the story, Horner's usual classical riffs were supplemented by Clannad in order to add a sort of all-purpose gloss of rootsiness. Similarly, in Avatar, Horner seems to apply the same tactic as linguist Paul Frommer did in creating the Na'vi language: a general sense of exoticism without resembling any specific language. So, Horner augments his synbrass with vocalese and 'ethnic' percussion to give a general impression of exotic orientalism Les Baxter or Martin Denny.

Zizek is right to call the film out for racism, "The film teaches us that the only choice the aborigines have is to be saved by the human beings or to be destroyed by them." He claims, "In other words, they can choose either to be the victim of imperialist reality, or to play their allotted role in the white man's fantasy." Few scenes in recent cinematic history can be as insulting as the one in which all the coloured people bow down before the heroic white man in 'blue face' - with the possible exception of the one almost immediately afterwards in which the death of one white woman causes a ceremonial grief amongst the Na'vi far outweighing that displayed for the several hundred of their own people just massacred. The skewed logic of equivalence noted by Judith Butler in her latest book, Frames of War, is here internalised even by the victims.

The film's true ideological core, however, is not revealed until we see the destruction of the great tree ("hometree") in which the Na'vi had made their home. In the shots of this vast arboreal tower coming crashing down, and equally in their ash-coated aftermath, the visual reference is clearly footage of the collapse of the World Trade Centre on September the 11th. In James Cameron's mind, the Na'vi are not supposed to represent the victims of American imperialism, but the Americans themselves, their post-9/11 phantasy representation of themselves as rootsy beleagured pioneers, beset by unknowably powerful and blindly hostile forces on all sides. Note, Cameron's insistence in interviews that the film is not "unAmerican" but reflects the fact "that we are living through war." Despite its superficial protest, the film directly supports the very phantasy which sustains and justifies US imperialism in Iraq, Afghanistan, and so forth.

Their exists, then, a cruel irony behind the recent protest by Palestinians on the West Bank who 'blued up' in order to highlight the resonance between their plight and that of Cameron's Na'vi. For, as should be clear from certain references to Israel scattered throughout the film - a Na'vi who is said to be the best singer shares her name, Ninet, with a popular Israeli singer, and "Ey'wa", the deity of the Na'vi resembles a verlan pronunciation of Yahweh, while "Na'vi" itself is a Hebrew word meaning 'prophet' - should leave us with no illusions as to who Cameron sees as the innocent victims in that particular conflict. When Stephen Lang's bloodthirsty colonel promises to "fight terror with terror" it is not Bush and Cheney that he should remind us of, but videos of Bin Laden and other terrorist leaders, insisting on the terroristic nature of American military intervention.

This is not, however, in the slightest to disparage a heartfelt political demonstration that caught the eye of the international media and was, at least in the eyes of its organisers, considered a success. So broadly and internationally popular a spectacle can scarcely resist containing some slight latent utopian promise, some hidden potential for the detournement of its ultimately conservative agenda. What is striking about the testimony of one of the Bil'in protest's organisers, Mohammed Khatib, is the way the use of Avatar's iconography seems to have resulted in the prior fictionalisation of the action itself, "At first they were surprised," He says, laughing of the onlooking Israeli soldiers."But then they began shooting and we felt like it was a scene from the movie again, except it was real, and it was taking place in the village."