Cinema Brut
Blind Existence / Virtual Reel

Kofi Fosu Forson

The authenticity of the fool is marked by conditioning. With no where left to stand, he attempts the greatest possible act--- that being himself isn’t a choice, it’s a necessity.

If you rented an apartment that had a prerequisite of living opposite an in house bull dog, would you comply? Knowing full well that the dog was dangerous, would you be willing to adapt to this animal’s needs in hope of changing its demeanor to take advantage of an affordable living situation?

This is a premise for Cinema Brut, a cinematic approach to the conveying of urban life using metaphors, dogmas, surreality and the visceral depicting the circumstances surrounding the options one is confronted with which momentarily defines who we are and challenges our character for life.

The aesthetics surrounding this are gender and fashion, artist and muse, sexual politics and emotional and physical torture. We as a subculture look to our forefathers and others who have helped carve a culture of the sardonic, miserable, haunted and enthused, forever glowing among the mid-city jubilee.

Cinema Brut is the authenticizing of life lived in urban mania in its actuality only given a form of sensationalism and compromising art-effect. What it becomes is exploring the traditional circumstances of life in urban culture represented within the facets of disillusionment, aestheticism, visceral texts both violent and sexual and an understanding bordering closure.

This allows for representation of the minds of a defeated culture whether emotionally, intellectually or sexually to share with the world how the experience in an urban setting is manipulated and allows for the embracing of matters both good and evil.

The basis of this foundation and structure is deterioration as in the inability to process society’s information. Urban culture dismisses the linearity of a supposed life-line. One’s existence is marked by the moment. It furthers a decided hopelessness curable only through immediate gratification. In this circumstance it’s made applicable to art.

What are the aesthetics of this existence? How is art and sex relevant? Does art exist as graffiti and is sex rape or managed as pleasure, driven by machismo, prostitution, muse, model, incest, aggression, murder or death?

Within this subscription one is led to wonder about one’s lifestyle and habitude. Is it camouflaged as urban or does one venture out safeguarded in uniqueness guided by individuality and personal expression?

Is there a contradiction between art and urban culture? How can the artist exist mildly or pronouncedly within the urban traces of music, sex, drugs and violence? There is a sense of the artist as homosexual, psycho, pedophile… The balancing of this and the emergence of the artist as an individual is given a premise along with the existing brutality.

Cinema as such has to refer to Scorcese’s Mean Streets and Bunuel’s Belle du Jour. They manage to capture the allure of sex and violence that which is in a sense the marketing of a particular kind of urban drug, adrenaline, exposed in a beat down, murder or gang-bang. The breakdown in any ghetto results in violence one way or another. The marketing of this is stereotyped which serves as pleasure for a society.

Indeed adrenaline in this case is brought about in the manifestation of the narrative. Somehow the digital video approaches a rush felt in the use of drugs or otherwise.

What becomes of the virtual reel is an example of the digital video imagined conscientiously. The mind is capable of revolving spontaneous movies reminiscent of sexual and violent fantasies. In these movies one is able to remote in turn the speed of motion, although some how it’s captivated as a production.

The difference between the virtual reel and a fantasy is that the video of the reel is qualified in a caption or box inside the mind. It takes on manners of film, manufacturing of lights, shade and colors. There’s that eventual grain and somehow it’s not caught up in time. It’s packaged as history. However one can hardly replay it as before.

Fantasy is envisioned as such. It’s immediate and it takes place in time. It lacks the ability to fast-forward or rewind. The moment has a feeling of excitement realized as sensational. The reel inspires something close to amazement.

Is it possible in this reality to hear a person moan and smell the scent of body?

In the modern sense sitting in reality’s (un)reality thinking and talking is somehow comparable to time spent in a romp. Irrespectively the virtual reel with all its colors and sounds is probably safer and more stimulating.

Urban reality needs the body. It commits to it in violence and sex, otherwise it has no purpose. Virtual reality disposes of the body and is left with conscience. The body then remains afloat. In the virtual reel the body takes on a celluloid form becoming hyperreal.

Our blind existence encourages a sense of development and formation but with extreme caution it is necessary to explore life’s adventures within the real and virtual making possible a world of cruelty tolerable within one’s imagination using signifiers of love and death.

The precept of any artist’s development is the interpreting of love and aggression. Whereas The Pre-Raphaelites represented a nurturing of love, Abstract Expressionism as a concentrated physical act of painting was violent and then rendered as controlled vehemence in the official and titled work of art.

The regard for this in an urban setting is language, whether definable as “street,” philosophy, art, semiotics… the purpose then becomes managing to embrace and in a sophisticated reality questioning reality’s (un)reality by forming a world for oneself based on escape and observation.